浜口陽三

Hamaguchi Yōzō was a copperplate print artist active internationally across the second half of the 20th century. As part of his work in Paris he broke new ground in color mezzotint techniques. His still, silent prints employing that method won a succession of prizes at international competitions and he was dubbed "the master of mezzotint." Hamaguchi was born on April 5, 1909, in Hiromura, Wakayama prefecture. His father, Hamaguchi Gihei, was the tenth president of Yamasa Corporation, a soy sauce company begun in 1645. Gihei was known as a collector of Nanga (literati painting), and he himself studied Nanga under Komuro Suiun and painted his own works. An earlier generation of the Hamaguchi Gihei name, Hamaguchi Gihei V (Kanpo), was a literati painter active in the late Edo period. In 1914, when Yōzō was five years old, the family moved to Chōshi in Chiba prefecture. Yōzō liked to draw pictures, and in 1921 at the age of twelve, his aunt Higashikuze Koroku (wife of Baron Higashikuze Hideo) who painted oil paintings as a hobby introduced him to Kataoka Ginzō, who taught him how to paint his first oil paintings. The following year he moved to Tokyo and entered Rikkyō Middle School. Later he transferred to the private Kyōka Middle School and studied painting under Anayama Gihei. Since Yōzō was his father's third son, he did not have to pursue a business career. He studied under Kobayashi Mango and Tatehata Taimu, before entering the Modeling section of the Sculpture Department at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School) in 1928. However he did not adjust well to that school, and with helpful advice from Umehara Ryūzaburō, he left school in 1930 and at the end of March that year, set sail for France. In the international art capital of Paris, Hamaguchi briefly studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and Académie Colarossi, and he spent his free time independently experiencing encounters with myriad artists and their works. He also traveled between Paris and the south of France where spent two years in the wonderful climate developing the sensitivity of an artist and diligently produced works. In later years he named Chardin, Seurat, Degas, Bonnard, and Bauhaus as his preferred painters and styles at the time. Starting in 1934 he entered oil paintings in three Salons in Paris under the pseudonym "Zoti," but he gradually lost interest in large oil paintings and started to paint small oils and watercolors. In 1936 and 1937 he traveled to Haiti, Cuba and America, and around that time met the American poet E. E. Cummings and the Surrealist painter Georges Malkine, who he would continue to interact with for the rest of his life. In 1937 he linked his name to the formation of the Jiyū Bijutsuka Kyōkai (Free Artists Association). In December 1938 he had his first solo exhibition at the Gallery André Schoeller (8th arrondissement, Paris), displaying the oils, watercolors, and drypoint “Cat” (1937, Musée Hamaguchi Yozo: Yamasa Collection, Tokyo) that he had painted in the two years since he set off on his travels. At last he seemed set on the path to becoming a painter when World War II broke out in 1939. In November of that year he regrettably sailed back to Japan from the south of France, abandoning his home and possessions in Paris amid the wartime conditions. Most of the works produced up to that point were lost. Once in Japan he briefly lived in Kyoto and studied Nanga under Shirakura Ka’nyū. Then he was deployed to French Indochina as an interpreter in 1941, where he caught malaria and spent the rest of the war. Upon his return to Japan after the war he found a place to recuperate and lived for around two years in the Shinyu-Ryokan in the Rendaiji Onsen hot springs area near Shimoda on the Izu Peninsula. Starting in the autumn of 1949 he borrowed a room at the home of artist Mori Yoshio in Yoyogi, Tokyo, and by the following summer he was fully involved in copperplate print production. That form of prints had yet to become common in Japan and Cummings and Malkine helped him acquire tools from America. In 1951 he had his first solo exhibition of copperplate prints at the Formes Gallery in the Ginza district, where he displayed drypoint and mezzotint works. He built a home and studio in Kami-Meguro 8-chome (present-day Ōhashi, Meguro-ku), arranged his art production environment, and felt confident in his print creation. He held a solo exhibition at the Yōseidō Gallery in the Ginza district in 1953 and then he departed for the artistic ground zero of Paris. On his first night in Paris after his arrival in December 1953 Hamaguchi was surprisingly reunited with Fernande Barrey and other old Parisian acquaintances in the La Coupole cafe in Montparnasse. They introduced Hamaguchi to the gallery owner Heinz Berggruen who happened to be seated nearby. He then quickly produced a larger work than his previous works, “Spanish Oil Bottle” (1954, The National Museum of Art, Osaka et al.) to show to Berggruen, who was impressed. Thus began his association with that gallery. At the latest by that summer he had begun working on color prints, and through the process of two-plate prints “Mauve” and “Rabbit” (both 1954, Musée Hamaguchi Yozo: Yamasa Collection, Tokyo et al.) he arrived at color mezzotints in the form of “Watermelon” (1955, The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama et al.). The following year his “Roofs of Paris” (1956, Museum of Modern Art, New York et al.) became one of Hamaguchi’s major works, which he described as expressing an “unconscious impression” of the view looking out from his prewar studio in Montmartre (“Hamaguchi Yōzō no sekai,” [The World of Hamaguchi Yōzō], Musée Hamaguchi Yozo: Yamasa Collection, 2023). His style of creating still-lifes made up of close at hand objects, such as cherries, grapes, and balls of knitting wool amid gentle darkness harboring a faint glow, firmed up in tandem with his finalization of his preferred techniques. At the 1957 International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo he won the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Prize, and the Grand Prize for prints at the Sao Paolo Biennale. The following 1958 he received the 9-Person Award at the International Exhibition of Drawings and Engravings in Lugano, Switzerland. That autumn he held a solo show at the Berggruen Gallery in Paris. At the time Paris was swept up in new art trends and Hamaguchi’s works were favorably received. Exhibition reviews used such terms as “still,” “meditative,” and “poetic.” He was one of the Japanese representatives at the 1960 Venice Biennale and went on to win a succession of prizes at major international print competitions in Ljubljana, Krakow, and other cities. In the seventeenth to eighteenth century Jacob Christoph Le Blon explored polychrome printing via the mezzotint printing process and it was used in medical text anatomy depictions, but he was not able to fully establish color separation in the method and it was abandoned after his death. (note 1) In the twentieth century several artists rediscovered the fascinating velvet black possible in mezzotint. Hamaguchi took that monochrome mezzotint process and developed it further, taking it to a gentle, colored matière expression. The color palette that arises from the four plates -- yellow, red, blue and black -- gives each work their mysterious profundity. Hamaguchi also continued to pursue monochrome black works. Stanley William Hayter’s “About Prints” (Oxford University Press, 1962) (note 2) includes an image of Hamaguchi’s monochrome “Grapes” (1956, The National Museum of Art, Osaka et al.). Through trial and error efforts Hamaguchi proceeded through sculpture, oil painting, watercolors, and Nanga to finally arrive at his chosen medium of copperplate printing. Once there he sought the artistic expression only possible in that medium. His artistic stance can be seen in the following statement, “In an age when prints are used primarily for painting reproduction and illustrations, the printing techniques used for such are simple. Today, when prints have been developed to the point of being an independent art form, new devices and discoveries must be made which will allow artists every freedom in terms of printing plates and printing techniques. We must not make it a common practice to state that one is correct, one is wrong. Whether printmaker, oil painter, or sculptor, all of today’s broad expansive art world must distance itself from its obsession with existing methods, existing technologies.” (‘Pi i pu ru (geijutsuka tsūshin) Nomura Mansaku; Shimomura Ryōnosuke; Hamaguchi Yōzō,’ “Geijutsu Shinchō” Vol. 10, No. 5, May 1959). The mezzotint revival led by Hamaguchi reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, with artists deciding to become printmakers appearing worldwide. (note 3) The “mezzotint” entry in the 1974 15th edition of the “Encyclopedia Britannica” introduced Hamaguchi as, “After the invention of photography in the 19th century, mezzotint was rarely used, although in the 20th century the French artist Georges Rouault and the English printmaker Stanley William Hayter each made several plates. Its most distinguished mid-20th-century advocate, Yozo Hamaguchi, a Japanese artist living in Paris, developed techniques for printing colour mezzotint, and other artists, such as Mario Avati of Great Britain and Merlyn Evans of France, have mastered it.” In 1981 Hamaguchi moved from Paris to San Francisco. The poster for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics used his print “Cherries and Blue Bowl” (1976, The National Museum of Art, Osaka et al.). In the US he displayed his works at the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco and then he returned to Japan in 1996. In 1998 the Musée Hamaguchi Yozo: Yamasa Collection opened in Tokyo. When he died on December 25, 2000, his funeral was held at the museum. Hamaguchi Yōzō’s works continue to be displayed in exhibitions every year, both in Japan and throughout the world. (Kambayashi Nahoko / Translated by Martha J. McClintock) (Published online: 2024-04-01) Notes 1. Ad Stijnman, ‘A Short History of Color Mezzotint: From Printing Color to Making Art,’ in “Time of the Mezzotint: Colors Beyond the Stars,” exh. cat., (Tokyo: Musée Hamaguchi Yozo: Yamasa Collection, October 2014) 6-9. 2. Stanley William Hayter, “About Prints,” (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 3. See note 1.