Some favourite subjects:
Some favourite subjects:
Furuya Korin. [Take Zukushi]. Kyoto, Unsodo 1906 (Meiji 39). 18x25cm publisher's boards; 50 colour woodcut designs on 25 double leaves, accordian folding. Light signs of use, a rather good copy. Au$1650
Exquisite printing, with metallic inks and dustings of mica, of often exquisite designs by the foremost of neo-Rimpa designers. One of three independent portfolios of designs by Korin each devoted to one plant. This one is bamboo. The others are pines and plums. Korin, whose name is taken from the original master, started as a gifted but unsurprising designer - prolific and workmanlike in ambition compared to Sekka. But come the twentieth century - the final years of his life; he died young in 1910 - his albums of designs (rather than art) need no apology.
Catalogue - Garden Furniture. John P. White, Bedford. A Complete Catalogue of Garden Furniture and Garden Ornament. By John P. White, The Pyghtle Works, Bedford ... Xmas, 1906. Bedford 1906. Quarto publisher's printed wrapper (a missing piece from the back wrapper expertly replaced); 112pp illustrated in line and photo throughout. A couple of related flyers loosely inserted, quite a good copy. Au$875
From pots to bridges and greenhouses; an extensive range, essential for the chic but thoroughly English - ie Arts & Crafts - garden. White made furniture designed by Baillie Scott and some of this stuff may well be his but the designs here are, with two exceptions, uncredited except by inference, from a passing remark, to White himself. The two credited are by The Hon. Mrs. Anstruther. You don't withold credit from someone like her. Many of the drawings are signed and while it isn't clear that the artist was also the designer those signed 'J.C.' are likely by James Crossland who designed furniture for White at about this time.
LANGE, Otto. Dekorationsmalereien fur das Burgerhaus. Stuttgart, Julius Hoffmann [1907?]. Folio 49x33cm, loose as issued in publisher's portfolio, decorated boards, printed label, (cloth spine detaching but lining and hinges firm enough); title and 24 chromolithograph plates printed by the firm Emil Hochdanz of Stuttgart. Title with some creasing round the very edges, two plates with insignificant crease in one corner. Au$750
A handsome pattern book of modern painted interiors by the young designer, later expressionist painter and printmaker. Maybe this is all a bit tasteful but it is quite smart. If Lange has stuck to handsome tasteful interiors, perhaps gone a bit more Bavarian folk art, he might not have lost his professorship in textile design come 1933 and ended up in the Degenerate Art bin.
Kameda Yoshiro (or Kichirobei). [Wayo Kenchiku Shin Hinagata]. Osaka, Seikado 1907 (Meiji 40). Six volumes 22x15cm, publisher's wrappers with title labels; illustrated throughout with plans, elevations, measured drawings etc. Wrappers with some surface rubbing or insect grazing; a pretty good set. Au$850
I'm not sure whether this should be described as Japanese principles applied to western design or the other way round. I think both, if it matters. An excellent builder's pattern book that was certainly put to wide use. There is a 2008 learned paper by Yanigasawa and Mizoguchi that shows how Kameda introduced Japanese carpentry and the modular system into western design but all except the precis of their paper is in Japanese so I have no idea how they go about proving their point. They do tell us that Kameda was a master carpenter in Fukuoka.
Exhibition - Tokyo 1907. . [Special number of Fuzoku Gaho devoted to the 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exhibition]. Tokyo 1907. Small quarto publisher's illustrated wrapper (spine worn); four double page plates (two colour), one tinted full page plate, b/w photo illustrations. A bit used but a pretty good copy. English translations of the plate captions on typed slips are loosely inserted. Au$175
The Fuzoku Gaho (1889 - 1916) was Japan's first graphic magazine. I'd like to know who the artist was of some of these plates. They masterfully capture the eagerness for the new, the wonder, the distractions, the shared delights, and the weary resignation of some parents. The 1907 exhibition was conceived as an international exhibition but this ambition fizzled due to lack of enthusiasm, if not nerve, on the part of officialdom. Nonetheless this was big stuff, expansive in its inclusion of technology, culture, the arts and popular entertainment - introducing not one but two ferris wheels to Tokyo. It did pretty good business, atttracting some six or seven million visitors.
Asai Chu. [Tosei Fuzoku Gojuban Utaawase]. Tokyo, Yoshikawa Hanschichi 1907 (Meiji 40). Two volumes 25x18cm publisher's wrapper with title labels; 52 full page colour woodcuts by Asai. An outstanding pair. Au$1500
Such a fresh and crisp copy of the original edition that I can't bring myself to flatten these out enough to photograph the interior. So the illustrations here, apart from the covers, are stolen from elsewhere to give an idea of the remarkable charm and humour of Asai's observations of the modern Japanese seen in pairs. Imagine these brighter on fresh cream paper. Asai, elder and teacher of the school of western painting, fortunately never abandoned the tradition of satirical illustration. This was published just before his death. Each of these illustrations accompanies a poem on modern customs; the book's title calls this a poetry competition.
Otake Kokkan. [Shogaku Kyoka Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Shonen Sekei 1907 (Meiji 40). Colour broadside 78x54cm. Quite a nice copy. Au$385
School life for small boys and girls; this was the new year gift from the boys' magazine Shonen Sekai. Boys and girls learn to read but then their ways seem to part: boys learn about rats while girls do flowers, boys learn to count while girls sew, boys write while girls fold paper. Otake by 1907 was a well regarded, prize winning, Nihonga painter who was firm about maintaining Japanese tradition but like many such artists was a busy producer of prints and illustrator of magazines, books and advertisements.
Exhibition - Tokyo 1907. The Tokyo Industrial Exhibition, an extra number of the 'Teikoku Gaho', an illustrated monthly magazine. Tokyo, Fuzanbo [1907]. Quarto publisher's colour illustrated wrapper (a bit used); profusely illustrated throughout, mostly photo illustrations, a few folding, two folding maps, some colour lithographs, including a folding plate of caricatures and an odd depiction of the 'patron goddis of industry'; interspersed sections of advertising on red paper. Au$500
A substantial and very useful round-up of the exhibition; there is a summary in English and the illustrations have English captions. The 1907 exhibition was conceived as an international exhibition but this ambition fizzled due to lack of enthusiasm, if not nerve, on the part of officialdom. Nonetheless this was big stuff, expansive in its inclusion of technology, culture, the arts and popular entertainment - introducing not one but two ferris wheels to Tokyo. And it did pretty good business, apparently atttracting some six or seven million visitors.
HADDON, Robert J. Australian Architecture. A technical manual .. Melbourne, Robertson [1908]. Octavo untrimmed in dark green morocco (spine now a dark brown) by Margaret Chapman, lettered in gilt on the spine and blocked in blind on the sides; [6],544pp, 94 plates (one colour). A very good copy. Au$2500
A special presentation copy bound in a credible (despite some typically clunky lettering) craft binding signed 'MC' on the rear dentelle - Margaret Chapman, one of the first professional craft binders in Australia; she established the Craftsman Bindery and won exhibition prizes in 1907 - with on heavy endpapers, a carefully calligraphed inscription from Haddon to Frank Templeman Mew "with the affectionate greetings of his one time pupil ... inscribed in Melbourne in the year 1909". and a mounted photograph of Haddon facing the caption "The author at work in the study at 'Anselm' Caulfield". Haddon served his articles with Mew in London from 1881.
Mew's architectural career was brief; born the second son in a family given to brewing for the eldest son and architecture for the rest, he was still young and unknown in the mid eighties when he was called back to brewing, so becoming a rich and successful businessman.
For generations this was the first true Australian architecture book. Before this we have some trade and technical literature, some government reports and scattered papers and, recently discovered, a pattern book printed but probably not published in Melbourne in 1885. So Mr Haddon is now moved down to second place. This is a matter of precedence rather than importance as no-one ever saw the pattern book. Despite Haddon's approach (a textbook rather than pattern book), his examples can easily be traced to his own projects - domestic, commercial, churches, hospitals and shearing sheds. His city office in this book, for example, is a close relative to his Fourth Victoria building in Collins Street, Melbourne.
His work was modern, very much Arts & Crafts (or Federation if you like) at this period and he argues for a specific response to local conditions and materials and demands a modern, honest use of materials. Not all his designs hark back to English antecedents; the colour plate here shows a city building owing a dramatic debt to Moorish Spain (and some fairytale castle) and his design for the Swinburne College building appears to be part Spanish mission and part Mesopotamian.
[Uenokoen Shimizu Do Saigo Nanshu Dozo no Zu] Tokyo, Tsunashima Kamekichi 1908 (Meiji 41). Colour woodcut 27x39cm. Rather good. Au$125
An almost sombre day in Ueno Park in comparison with the psychedelic colouring of cheap lithograph views of the time. Still, you can be sure that the photographer at work turned out less exciting views than this. The statue is of Saigo Takamori. Least said about him by me the better.
Ogawa Usen [also known as Soju Usen]. [Soju Manga]. Tokyo, Hidaka Yurindo 1908 (Meiji 41). 255x190mm publisher's printed wrapper (some wear, spine chipped); [6],136;[4],[8]pp; woodcut illustrations throughout, a few colour, most printed in sienna. Originally stapled, the staples have perished; a used but very decent copy in a modern chitsu. Au$750
First edition of Usen's first book; a facsimile was published in the seventies. A lively collection of pictures, seemingly naive at times but as Hillier said of a later book - Sangushu (1921) - "The childlike naivete of the original sketches is ... actually the acme of sophistication ... the artist is as elliptical as the poet." (Hillier; The Art of the Japanese Book).
Usen hadn't yet attained the fame that brought the quality of printing his later work has but he makes up for that here with humour and imagination. Usen studied western painting before starting his career as a newspaper and magazine illustrator and is among the best of the generation of artists born and educated with the Meiji, soaked in both the foreign and the nationalistic reaction to the foreign, and determined not to step backwards into regurgitating tradition nor become mimics of the west. Some of his late work seems refined to the point of kitsch to me but when sleek expensive art journals publish articles in English on the hitherto neglected anarchistic aims of Usen's early work we know that he has truly arrived.
OCLC finds no copy of this outside the National Diet Library.
Hikifuda. Tsumura Juntendo. - [Chujo Yu - Herupu]. [Tokyo? 1908-09]. Colour lithograph 265x375mm. Old vertical folds, stabholes in the right margin and tips clipped from the left corners indicating it was once part of an album. A pretty good copy. Au$225
Tsumura Juntendo - still in business - began selling herbal remedies in Tokyo in the 1890s and 'Help' - Tsumura's herbal wonder cure for women - went on the market in 1907. This handsome hikifuda - handbill or poster - includes a calendar for 1909.
CORELLI, Marie. The Devil's Motor. A Fantasy. London, Hodder & Stoughton [1910]. Quarto publisher's decorated red cloth blocked in gilt and black; 52 heavy leaves printed on one side, six mounted colour illustrations by Arthur Severn. Endpapers a touch discoloured, an excellent, bright copy in the remains of the dustwrapper. Still with a faint scent of smoke - a production gimmick. Au$200
An impassioned impeachment (try saying that five times quickly) of the automobile - symbol of all the destructive forces of greed and modern industry - written at full flight with all of Corelli's awkward grasp of the overwrought. The clever cover design is suggestive, at first glance, of Christmas - fitting for what is obviously a Christmas gift book - but the holly-like border is made up of bat-winged car wheels.
Japanese design. [Kika Monyo - Geometric Patterns]. n.p. n.d. [c1910-30?]. Oblong folio (275x365mm) decorated cloth with paper title label (some insect nibbling of the cloth); 50 double page leaves of light card bound as an accordian fold - meaning that each design is 275x730mm and given enough room the whole could be opened out some 36 and a half metres - each a design painted in gouache with some metallic and transparent layers. Rubbing or offsetting of colours here and there and a few leaves with some adhesion at each edge, nothing too serious. Au$3500
A spectacular collection of large designs and something of a mystery. This is a sophisticated, professional production for presentation; this is not an artist's personal scrapbook and there is nothing amateurish or studentlike about the designs or the album; but I can't find a name anywhere. On the back of some sheets are some sketched pencil designs and occasional characters, nothing I can interpret. Design competitions were held in the textile trade in the early 20th century and entered albums of designs were both serious and anonymous; perhaps this was for some such competition.
One current chic kimono maker (撫松庵) has a signature pattern that looks like it was lifted almost whole from this album. If this was western I would date it to the sixties, perhaps the fifties, but I have no hesitation declaring this decades earlier. I have seen a 1913 album of original designs that contains what could be one of the dullest designs in this.
It took me a while to see that page after page of this album comes from the same six straight lines - the hemp (Asanoha - 麻の葉) pattern. Plenty of cultures mastered ornamental pattern, even an Englishman, Robert Billings, did a good job in the 1850s, but no-one seems to be able to re-invent over and over from the most simple foundation with such vibrant strength as a Japanese designer of this calibre.
Once Japan took back and redigested - from the late 19th century on - what the west had taken from Japan, what we regard as modernism, I find it almost impossible to decide what is borrowed and what was always theirs. Can I see the influence of the scraperboard technique popular in the twenties or is it the development of the traditional asymetrical graining of nature? I saw a giant Argyle sock but it is, I think, based on the swastika design popular in textile design for centuries. And what would have been produced using smart new technology in the west - plastics, spiral binding perhaps - has been put together with materials and techniques unchanged for a couple of centuries or so.
The previous owner of this firmly equivocated and dated it somewhere between 1900 and 1940. After studying it for some time I think he was right. But having seen some of these patterns and colours used in early Taisho books and posters, I narrow it down to between 1910 and 1920.
Hikifuda - fashion. . A small hikifuda - handbill - advertising fashion from Kawaki Shoten in Ogawamachi in Tokyo. Tokyo [c1910?]. Colour lithograph broadsheet 18x19cm. Illustration on one side, text in blue on the other. An old crease. Au$65
Small but chic. Is the young dandy wanting the stylish but undeniably bourgeois family to move on or is that merely a dandy's customary expression of disdain?
Teruha toiletry poster. [Hakuresui or Hakureisui]. A shop poster for Hakuresui toiletry to whiten the skin and remove blemishes. Osaka, Takegaki Shokai c1910. Colour lithograph 53x38cm on quite heavy paper. A couple of tiny edge chips, a near invisible repair to a short tear; a rather good copy. Au$1200
Among the myriad images that use race superiority and fear to sell goods - particularly soaps, toiletries and cosmetics - this is the weirdest and most hypnotic that I've ever seen. The weirdness intensifies if you know that the model is Teruha, maybe Japan's most famous geisha and pin-up girl at the end of the Meiji and through the Taisho period. Born Tatsuko Takaoka, in this poster she is about 14 and has possibly graduated from her apprentice name, Chiyoha. Sold by her father at 12, her virginity was soon sold to the president of the Osaka stock exchange and by the time she was 14 she had been engaged to one wealthy business man, promised to another and had a secret affair with an actor. The extended left pinkie finger must be a joke about her misguided sacrifice to love which earnt her yet another name: the Nine Fingered Geisha.
Before and after - or with and without - comparisons were nothing new in Japanese advertising. Neither were celebrities: courtesan prints sold patent medicines long before the Americans arrived and Bismarck adorned adverts for a patent syphilis cure that did for medicine what Bismarck did for Germany. Darkie - coon, nigger, whatever you want to call it - advertising images were obviously not unknown but neither can they have been familiar enough to be taken for granted and reproduced to the American and British formula in the way that the jazz age negro became a standard pattern to be played with by artists and designers in Japan as everywhere else. There is more than hint of a jovial tengu, spirit or minor god here, but for that suit.
Specimen Hikifuda. Hikifuda of lucky gods driving a motor car. n.p. [1911]. Colour lithograph and woodcut 52x38cm. Stab holes in the margin show it was once in an album. Horizontal fold; quite good. The picture is lithographed, the calendar woodcut. Au$200
An extra psychedelic extravaganza in experimental colour showing lucky god Ebisu being chauffered by Daikokuten. These two did embrace modernity and had very good tailors as can be seen when the occasion demanded a smart suit or an even more smart uniform. Here they haven't dressed; it's just two friends on an outing. Maybe a joyride. I wonder whether it was good luck to have these two snaffle your car.
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced by publisher's with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. The handy calendar is for 1912.
Hikifuda. Hikifuda of a woman driving a motor car. n.p. [1912]. Colour woodcut 53x37cm. Old folds, rumpling and a couple of small repairs. Au$800
A while ago I offered a 1914 printed hikifuda something like this and asked whether anyone had seen an earlier picture of a Japanese woman driving a car? Now the answer is: I have. Cars and planes were the password for modernity through the Taisho, especially in advertising like this, but sleek women were driven by sleek husbands or chauffeurs. This is radical stuff. It's not until well into the twenties that women behind the wheel became common. Common but not really acceptable. Cars were driven by Mogas - modern girls - louche young women with bobbed hair and short skirts: flappers.
The history of early Japanese women motorists, in English, is blank. Can some expert out there help? These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced by publisher's with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. In this case it was Tamachi Taya of Kaneko-mura. The handy calendar is for 1913.
Kawabata Ryushi [Nijuyon Toki Katei]. Tokyo, Fujin Sekai 1912 (Meiji 45). Colour broadside 54x78cm. A bit used, a few small holes in folds. Au$400
The new year gift from the magazine Fujin Sekai - Woman's World - charting the day in the busy but calm and most decorative life of the successful woman - wife and mother.
Kawabata's career took a curious turn during a 1913 stay in America to study western painting. Apparently he was so impressed with the Japanese art he saw in Boston he switched to being a Nihonga painter. Still, he remained being an illustrator for magazines for quite some time. As did most of the early to mid 20th century artists now revered.
Ota Saburo. Asagiri. Tokyo, Seibido 1912 (Meiji 45). Two volumes 19x13cm publisher's colour illustrated wrappers; excellent in a mildly shabby publisher's box; illustrated in colour throughout. An outstanding copy. Au$1300
"A series of small colour prints of astonishing invention and charm," said Hillier in the 'Art of the Japanese Book' and there is no need to improve on that. Hillier was uncertain as to what is woodblock and what is lithography and I'm not sure it matters much. The tangle of western and traditional technique and discernment could take years to untangle with artists and books like this. The covers play with the popular sword and sash novels of an earlier generation for which some great artists did woodblock covers that put together formed a picture. Warrior on one and beauty on the other was standard.
Ota Saburo is among the best of the generation of artists who studied oil painting and refused to become western copyists, instead forging new a Japanese art which saw some of the most delightful illustrated books you could wish to see. Here he is gently subverting traditional Japanese forms for a radical end. The women are delicate and lovely but they are delicate and lovely with lovely big feet, capable hands and a hint of perspiration more than perfume.
QUENIOUX, Gaston. Elements de Composition Decorative. Cent themes de decoration plane. Paris, Hachette, 1912. Quarto publisher's decorated cloth blocked in green and red (back hinge partly split, a bit marked); [8],318pp, 543 illustrations including 25 colour plates. Natural browning of the text paper, still a rather good copy. Au$100
A thorough grounding in design in one hundred parts, each focussed on a particular form of pattern or field of design: printing, ceramics, textiles, etc. The examples come from everywhere and all times but all somehow sit well with the stylish Art Nouveau forms of modern design that Quenioux espouses.
New York Architecture. Competition for the New York Court House MCMXIII. Edited by authority of the Court House Board. NY, Architectural Book Publishing [1913]. Hefty folio, 52x36cm, loose as issued in publisher's portfolio (rubbed and worn but solid); five leaves of preliminary text and 88 plates: plans elevations and perspectives. Ex library with small stamps on the preliminary pages and the back of the plates; a couple of marginal tears; used but decent enough. Au$475
Twelve major architects were invited and a preliminary competition selected another ten to enter the competition for a new New York Supreme Court. Ten were originally invited and the New York Times complained about the regulations and about missing names like Cass Gilbert, George B. Post, Cram Goodhue & Ferguson and a couple of others. Whatever effect this complaint had, Gilbert and Post were included but the competition remained firmly unpublic. Guy Lowell won with a grand circular mass that was then revised, by the time it was built, into a completely different building.
The first critics of note were the Supreme Court Justices who said they preferred the old Tweed building to Lowell's design. And the Justices remained critics of note. Despite resiting and revisions over the next few years they remained implacably opposed to a circular court building. But it was economics that killed it in the end.
All the entries are included - a fair division of four plates each - and as to be expected the temple is predominant, more or less adapted or added to. McKim Mead and White's design looks they had a hotel in mind and of the few that went upwards, as New York was meant to go, some have put an awkward (or picturesque depending on taste) tower on a temple. George and Edward Blum's tower is the only building that truly looks modern in the New York of 1913 but modernity and elegance don't personify the weight and dignity of the law.
Design. An album of designs for textiles and/or paper. c1913-1920's? Large folio cloth [620x430mm]; 24 card leaves with 39 mounted original colour block prints (3 double page). Expected signs of use but nothing drastic; one print removed. Au$1200
Doubtless the designer's album of designs, these are proof prints from the blocks, each show the shape where the repeat pattern fits. The first pages are annotated with details of the client ('Achete a George. 9 Rue St Fiacre Paris' - in earlier decades this was the home of a calico manufacturer, which makes sense, and now houses a public relations firm and Ella Bache, which is neither here nor there) and the engraver (Gillet, sometimes in concert with someone else); the details dwindle as the album proceeds until we reach the large and dramatic geometric design in black and white which was "vendu a Mrs Bosset".
Dating these designs to 1913 would seem foolish but for the first few leaves being dated 1913 in the top corner; two or three are dull, traditional floral patterns but the rest, while by no means radical avant garde, would sit more happily in the next decade or two - some are really quite stylish. The theme is floral, or at least botanical although one is based on a Chinese cloud pattern; several are oriental in style or inspiration and one is a very stylish piece of Japanese abstraction.
I'm pretty sure this is the work of a Japanese designer in Paris, partly because it most recently came from Tokyo and partly because of the modern simplicity of several designs.
Catalogue - tiles. . . [Haku ki-shiki - Uoruban - MI Shokai?]. Tokyo 1914 (Taisho 3). 15x23cm publisher's decorated wrapper; 12 leaves printed on one side being three pages of text, two photo illustrations, a small colour chart and 18 colour designs on eight leaves, plate of cornice profiles. A nice copy. Au$175
A nifty catalogue of architectural ceramics - tiles, mouldings and cornices - for building exteriors produced by, I think, a manufacturing co-operative.
Specimen hikifuda. Hikifuda of a woman driving a motor car. n.p. [1914]. Colour woodcut 52x38cm. Stab holes in the margin showing it was once in an album; a little browned and minor signs of use. Rather good. Au$500
Has anyone seen an earlier picture of a Japanese woman driving a car? I haven't. Cars and planes were the password for modernity through the Taisho, especially in advertising like this, but sleek women were driven by sleek husbands or chauffeurs. This is radical stuff. It's not until well into the twenties that women behind the wheel became common. Common but not really acceptable. Cars were driven by Mogas - modern girls - louche young women with bobbed hair and short skirts, flappers. The history of early Japanese women motorists, in English, is blank. Can some expert out there help?
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced by publisher's with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. The handy calendar is for 1915.
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