Fishermen

Fishermen, undated but produced within the broader corpus of Kanae Yamamoto's coastal-subject prints, is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and preserved via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kanae_Yamamoto_-_Fishermen.jpg). The fishermen subject was foundational to Yamamoto's sosaku-hanga (creative print) program, his 1904 print Gyofu (Fisherman), reproduced in the literary magazine Myojo, having effectively launched the movement in Japan through its single-artist methodology of carved and printed blocks in which the artist's own hand executed every stage of the work. The composition handles its coastal working subject through that same hand-cut technique, the visible knife mark on the block carrying the principal expressive weight and the spare black-and-white aesthetic distinguishing the work from the polished commercial ukiyo-e tradition that had preceded it. The fishermen subject permitted Yamamoto to extend his program into the working life of Japanese coastal communities, registering through the print medium a social environment that traditional ukiyo-e had treated only sporadically and that yoga (Western-style) painters had begun to incorporate as a serious subject. The selection of working fishermen rather than picturesque beach scenes reflected the broader sosaku-hanga interest in the social documentary subject, an interest that connected the movement to the European modernist print traditions Yamamoto had encountered during his 1912-14 residence in France. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, holds the print as part of its substantial collection of early sosaku-hanga material, preserving the work as a representative document of Yamamoto's coastal-subject practice and of the social documentary impulse within the founding period of the creative print movement.