Kawanishi Hide

Kawanishi Hide was born on July 9, 1894 in the port city of Kobe, where he lived all his life. Inspired by Yamamoto Kanae's (1882-1946) creative prints (sōsaku hanga), which Kanae carved and printed himself, he taught himself to carve and print while still in high school. 

“I first got excited about woodcuts when I saw Kanae Yamamoto’s print A Small Bay in Brittany in the window of an art shop in Osaka. I’d seen ukiyo-e, of course, but they didn’t interest me. Yamamoto’s print did, and I started to make a few prints along with my oils.”2 (Along with Yamamoto the artist also sites Lautrec, Van Gogh, Onchi and Gaugin as having direct influence on his work.)3

Graduating from Kobe business school in 1915, Kawanishi showed no interest in his family’s shipping business.  To his father’s chagrin, he chose to resurrect the family’s hereditary postal job knowing that it would allow him time to create prints. 

Despite his isolation from the center of the sōsaku hanga movement in Tokyo, Kawanishi was a core member of the movement. He first exhibited prints with the Nihon Sosaku-Kiyokai (Creative Print Association) in 1923, which he joined in 1932, and starting in 1931, he exhibited with Kokugakai (National Painting Association) which he joined in 1935.  Kawanishi contributed to several creative print magazines, to the series One Hundred New Views of Japan (Shin Nihon hyakkei), to the first three collections of the Ichimoku-kai (Onchi Kōshirō’s First Thursday Society) and to the 1946 post-war portfolios Nihon Minzoku Zufu and Nihon Jozoku-sen. 

Kawanishi’s work is characterized by use of primary colors and the absence of black outlines defining the shapes. In fact, Kawanishi purposely softened the edges of his forms by using a round chisel rather than a knife to carve the contours.  He used poster colors, which he never mixed, and treated black as “just another color.”4 

In commenting on his small color pallet Kawanishi said, “Perhaps because my ancestral home is so dark and gloomy, I like to use primary colors in simple contrasting effects.”5  While Kawanishi may have seen Kobe as dark and gloomy, he loved living in this port town whose setting provided material and inspiration for many of his prints.

“When I was a boy I used to go to a nearby bar for sailors and watch them having a good time.  I’ve always liked the free and easy atmosphere of a port.”6 

In 1952-1953 he created the series Kobe Hyakkei (One Hundred Scenes of Kobe), "poster color drawings of the changing city after the World War." (See IHL Cat. #1262.)

Another popular subject of Kawanishi’s prints is the circus.  The artist tells the story of asking the manager of a visiting German circus for one of their advertising posters and being given an entire set of posters.7 It's easy to imagine these posters displaying the flat simplified shapes of Art Deco posters of the period, a style that Kawanishi adopted, as shown below.

In creating his prints, Kawanishi used solid blocks of katsura or ho, and printed on thick hodomura paper, thoroughly moistened so that the colors seep through to the back.8