Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996) Japanese Printmaker Celebrates Christmas

Watanabe was a statistical outlier of excellence in the world of uniform Japanese art, he created a contemporary version of the illuminated biblical manuscripts.  He devoted his life to biblical imagery in his woodcut/stenciled prints in a country that averages 3% Christianity. When the former big Protestant churches of the United States divided up the world for proselytizing, they didn't understand the challenges of bringing the gospels to Japan. There is a statement in Japan: Japanese are born Shinto and die Buddhist; they have no problem being two different religions at the same time. The Christian concept that “You Shall Not Have Any Other Gods Before Me” straight out of the 10 Commandments from Exodus and Deuteronomy made no sense to the Japanese. The Japanese believe there should be multiple Gods.

Watanabe was born on July 7, 1913 in Tokyo, and his father died when he was 10 years old. Fatherless, a neighbor (a Christian Japanese school teacher) invited him to church which altered and changed the course of his life. As luck turned out, as a young man he met and apprenticed under the famous Japanese textile artist Keisuke Serizawa, working in the fabric dyeing shop. Almost all artists in Japan must apprentice and study under another established artist for at least ten years. This most fortunate apprenticeship put him on track to be part of the Japanese folk art movement known as mingei. This craft philosophy equated to “ordinary people’s craft” (民衆的な工芸, minshuteki na kogei). Watanabe was able to meld this ordinary traditional printmaking with beloved biblical stories that developed notoriety within the  Christian wider-world community.

He portrayed the Christian gospels with a distinctive use of crumpled wet paper mixed with mineral pigments suspended in soy milk, known as katazome. His paper had texture and the mineral pigments he created were lessons he had learned from his Serizawa apprenticeship. With these highly toned skills, he created vibrant pictorial lessons from Sunday School. As in the case below, the story is from Matthew 2: 1-12, where the wise men came from the east to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child that is born the King of the Jews?” And directly from the holy scriptures: The wise men went to the house, where they saw the child with his mother Mary. They bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures. They gave him gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is part of the great Christmas story!

“The Wise Men Visit the Christ Child - Adoration of the Magi”

Stencil Cut Print with Mineral Pigments

Approx. 7.5 X 8.5 Inches

Pencil Signed with Hanko Stamp Lower Right

Printed: 1967

Watanabe once said of his prints, “I would most like to see them hanging where people ordinarily gather, because Jesus brought the gospel for the people.” And his prints have hung in ordinary and extraordinary places including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Art Museum in Tokyo, as well as the White House and Vatican City. The Bowden Collections, a religious institution, has one of the largest collections of his hand-colored stenciled prints on handmade washi paper; below is a photo of Watanabe using his laborious stenciling methods from the March-April 1970’s edition of Art in America. Watanabe devoted his entire life to depicting biblical scenes, from the Garden of Eden to the angelic trumpets at the end of time, he died in Tokyo on January 8, 1996.

Example of Watanabe's Pencil Signature

Notes:

• Watanabe came down with tuberculosis and had two years to review the biblical scriptures; he was baptized in September of 1930 (age 17). His mother followed his example on Christmas Day.
• Watanabe joined Serizawa as an apprentice in the early 1940s.
• In 1958, Watanabe received first prize at the Modern Japanese Print Exhibition in New York City.
• Watanabe used kozo paper (from mulberry tree) and momigami (kneaded paper). The momigami paper was crumpled by hand, squeezed and wrinkled to give a rough quality to the prints. The katazome method uses traditional organic and mineral pigments in a medium of soybean milk. The protein in the milk bound the colors to the paper's surface. The use of natural materials is one of the characteristics of mingei (folk art).
• John Kohan writes: Watanabe's wife, "Harue soaked the soybeans whose milk was used as a binder for her husband’s paints, straining it through cloth. She also mixed a paste from rice bran, sticky rice, lime, and salt to cover the colored sections of each print sheet, so that a final layer of black could be brushed on to bring out the lines marked by the stencil pattern. After the prints dried, she would rinse them in water and clean off the resist-paste to reveal the final colored image edged in black. While Watanabe cut stencils, his wife mixed paste and paint."
• Watanabe worked in near obscurity during his life in Japan, while he was well known in the Christian world. By the time I arrived in Japan in 2008, his work was well recognized and was known but not well collected in Japan.

References: 

• Wikipedia - Sadao Watanbe (Artist)
• John Kohan, Profound Faith, Profound Beauty, and the Art of Sadao Watanabe, Issue 74, Image Journal - Image@Imagejournal.org  Seattle, WA.
• Sadao Watanabe, Artnet (database)
• My personal experiences as a Mike Mansfield Fellow to Japan (2008-09) #13

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©2021. Waller-Yoblonsky Fine Art is a research collaborative, working to track artists that got lost and overlooked due to time, changing styles, race, gender and/or sexual orientation. Our frequent blogs highlight artists and art movements that need renewed attention with improved information for the researcher and art collectors. The photos and blog was created by Mr. Waller and all written materials were obtained by the Fair Use Section 107 of The Copyright Act. #waller-yoblonskyblogspot #walleryoblonskyblogspot #sadaowatanabe