Yoshitoshi Mori

Yoshitoshi Mori (森義利, 1898–1992) was a Japanese artist best known for the bold kappazuri stencil prints he produced in the second half of his long life, work that made him a distinctive figure associated with the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement. He was born on October 31, 1898, in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo — in the home of his grandfather — and grew up surrounded by the commercial culture of the old city, an environment that would later shape the subjects of his art.

Contrary to the image of a self-taught outsider, Mori received substantial formal training. He studied brush drawing from around 1915 and graduated in 1923 from the Japanese-style painting division of the Kawabata School of Fine Arts (Kawabata Gagakkō). He apprenticed under the print artist Yamakawa Shūhō and, crucially, came into the orbit of the mingei (folk craft) movement: he studied stencil-dyeing with the textile artist Serizawa Keisuke and became a frequent visitor to the Japan Folk Crafts Museum and its founder, Yanagi Sōetsu. For many years Mori worked chiefly in stencil-dyed textiles (katazome) rather than in prints.

It was relatively late that he turned fully to printmaking. He began making kappazuri stencil prints in 1951, at the age of fifty-six, and committed himself to prints entirely around 1960. In 1962 he left the craftsmen's division of the Kokugakai as tensions grew with Serizawa over the boundary between art and craft, and thereafter he pursued stencil printmaking on his own terms.

His signature subject matter drew from the world of Edo-period popular culture: kabuki theater, sumo wrestling, festival scenes, folk tales, and the daily life of Tokyo's merchants and craftsmen. Kabuki actors in dramatic mie poses, sumo wrestlers locked in combat, festival-goers carrying portable shrines through crowded streets, and shopkeepers at work filled his compositions with narrative energy and humor.

Mori's technique was as distinctive as his subjects. Growing directly out of his katazome stencil-dyeing background, his kappazuri method built up images from hand-cut stencils, and he worked in a bold, graphic style characterized by thick outlines, flat planes of saturated color, and simplified forms that recalled both traditional folk painting and modern graphic design. His figures were sturdy and expressive, their costumes rendered in vivid patterns of red, indigo, gold, and black, with a textile-like density unusual among print artists.

Over the decades Mori took part in numerous international print exhibitions, showing abroad repeatedly between the late 1950s and the 1970s. He remained independent of Japan's art associations until 1982, when he joined the Japan Print Association, and in 1984 he received an honorary doctorate in art from the University of Maryland — the first Japanese artist to be so honored. He continued producing prints into his nineties, working almost until the end of his life.

Mori died in 1992 at the age of ninety-three, shortly after his final solo exhibition, having produced a body of work remarkable for both its consistency of vision and its exuberant celebration of traditional Japanese popular culture — a version of old Tokyo preserved in stencil and pigment.