ShikÅ Munakata
Shiko Munakata (Japanese栋 方 志 功, Munakata Shiko, born September 5, 1903 in Aomori, † 13 September 1975) was a Japanese wood carver and painter, as a representative of Sosaku hanga and Mingei movement the traditional Japanese woodcut in 20. century renewed and contemporary trends in international art realigning.
Life and work
On September 5, 1903 Shiko Munakata was born in Aomori, the sixth of 15 children. The father was an old family tradition blacksmith. After his mother 's death in 1920 Munakata worked as an usher, as he began to draw and sketch in his spare time. After Munakata had seen in an illustrated magazine works of Vincent van Gogh, he started to deal with the oil painting. Together with school friends, he founded a group of painters who had committed to the " Western Style " ( Yōga ). His enthusiasm for Van Gogh's painting hardly knew bounds. In his autobiography, he noticed himself that he had done everything to be like Van Gogh. In September 1924 Munakata went to Tokyo to promote his career as a painter and achieved in fact first exhibition successes.
He drew scenes of the city with destruction caused by the earthquake of 1923 A arisen already in Aomori painting is on the 5th Imperial Art Exhibition -. Unsuccessfully - issued. By 1928 his works at the following exhibitions will be rejected. 1925 Munakata worked for about a year at the Kyozai publishing agency as an illustrator. In March, an oil painting of him on the 3rd Exhibition of Hakujitsu group in the newly opened Tokyo Prefecture Museum was shown. Different traditions report that Munakata was inspired by the woodcut early summer breeze by Sumio Kawakami, whom he saw in 1926, to deal with this artistic technique, which he preferred in the following years. Increasingly he came to the conclusion that the numerous groups that wanted to establish a Western-style art in Japan, hardly went beyond imitative approaches. So he decided for himself that in Japan most traditional technique of wood engraving is the appropriate means of expression for him. Munakata but not geared to the famous and popular Ukiyo -e style of the 17th to 19th century, but he returned to significantly older traditions of Zen Buddhism from the 9th to 11th centuries.
1931 published the publisher Kuraba Hanga the book Wedding Zodiac with woodcuts Munakata. At the same time 27 oil paintings and seven woodcuts were presented in a first solo exhibition. In the autumn of Munakata took a trip on which the two woodcuts gardens of the manor Hasegawa Kameda: The inner garden and the rear garden emerged, with whom he on the 7th Kokugakai exhibition won the Kokugakai Prize the following year. The Musée du Luxembourg and the Boston Museum bought the first time works by him. 1933 was the magazine Hangeijutsu ( art of printing ) issued a special edition with Print Munakata. At the exhibition on contemporary Japanese woodcut, which took place in Paris in the spring of 1934, Munakata was represented with several works and in 1936 in Berlin on the occasion of the Olympic Games organized international art exhibition two prints Munakata were shown.
Inspired by Soetsu Yanagi, Munakata began to deal with the Urazaishiki technique, which he used later in his woodcuts. The colors are not applied on the front of the pressure but with the brush from behind the translucent paper, from where they feed through to the front of the sheet. This technique makes it possible to maintain the high-contrast printing effect of woodcuts and at the same time to achieve a painterly effect.
In 1938 he became the first artist with a printed graphic work a price on the Bunte Show ( The Story of the Great Cormorant ), whereby he gained greater prominence in Japan. In 1941 he received for his series Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Shaka the Saburi price as the most important modern artists of the year in Japan. Due to the fighting in the Pacific during the Second World War Munakata was evacuated with his family in April 1945 from Tokyo to Fukumitsu in the central Japanese prefecture of Toyama, where they lived until November 1951. His house in Yoyogi was destroyed in air raids on Tokyo, where a large part of its incurred up to that art was lost.
In dealing with the music of Beethoven came in 1951 for the textile manufacturer Soichiro Ohara series to honor Beethoven's 5th Symphony, which was shown in the same year at the 1st Biennial of São Paulo in Brazil. 1955 finally he succeeded in his third participation at the Biennale of São Paulo 's international breakthrough. Munakata was awarded for his work Two Bodhisattva and Ten Great Disciples of Shaka and three women ascending, three women absinkend the First Prize in the category of pressure, the medal Lužica Matarazzo. A year later he exhibited at the Venice Biennale of eleven works and won with grazing in green and red flowers in the Grand Prize for Printmaking.
The following years were filled with many travels and exhibitions in Japan, America and Europe. 1960 his works were shown in a traveling exhibition, among others, in Vienna, Braunschweig and Frankfurt am Main. In 1964 he was awarded the Asahi Prize. Munakata received repeated invitations to lecture at universities in the United States. On the occasion of the inauguration of a cultural center, for which he had created two murals, his birthplace Aomori named him an honorary citizen in 1969. At the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970, he was with the two monumental murals Earth, represented by mankind to the gods and sky, from the gods to mankind. In the same year he was honored as a person with special cultural merits. Although he his health increasingly caused problems, Munakata undertook numerous journeys continue and organized exhibitions at home and abroad. In October 1973, the Munakata Foundation was established and opened in 1974 on his 71st birthday in Kamakura the Munakata Museum. On September 13, 1975 Shiko Munakata died at his home in Tokyo a progressive cancer. Two months later opened in the Shiko Munakata Aomori Museum of Art.
In Japan, Munakata was highly honored after his death in 1975. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary of the death an extensive retrospective of his woodblock prints took place, which was of Modern Art in Tokyo to see, among others, in the National Museum. 2002, it was then the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an exhibition devoted to the artist. 2004 showed the Municipal Art Museum Spendhaus Reutlingen first time in over forty years back work of this extraordinary woodcarver in Germany.