Yozo Hamaguchi

The Hamaguchi family's ties to the soy sauce industry extends as far back as 1645.

While the family's wealth mainly derived from their centuries-old business, Hamaguchi's lineage demonstrated a long-held appreciation for the arts as his father was an avid collector of Nanga, Edo-period literati paintings.

Additionally, one of Yozo's ancestors, Kansuke Hamaguchi, was a Nanga painter during the late Edo era.

From an early age, Hamaguchi desired to pursue a career in the arts instead of the family business.

Yozo Hamaguchi (April 5, 1909 - December 25, 2000) was a Japanese copper printmaker who specialized in mezzotint and was responsible for its resurgence as a printmaking medium in the mid-20th century.

Hamaguchi's prints are distinguished for their careful attention to detail of boldly hued animals and objects contrasted against a velvety black background.

The corpus of Hamaguchi's prints are focused on the still life genre.

He entered the Tokyo Art School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) in 1927 to study sculpture, but left in 1930 to pursue an independent career.

The Yōga style painter Ryuzaburo Umehara advised Hamaguchi to seek artistic training and inspiration in France as this was the means through which he developed his style.

Throughout the 1930s, Hamaguchi lived in Paris where he studied oil painting, watercolor, and copperplate printing.

Eventually, Hamaguchi became more intent on a career as an oil painter and regularly created sketches and preparatory drawings for his planned paintings.

During this period, Hamaguchi met and befriended the American poet e.e. Cummings, who soon became a great admirer of his sketches.

Cummings remarked on the beauty of Hamaguchi's work and added they had the potential to become more aesthetically pleasing in print form.

Shortly thereafter, Hamaguchi was introduced to the mezzotint medium after Cummings gifted him with a set of intaglio tools.

In 1937, Hamaguchi tried his hand at mezzotint and produced his first image, Cat, in which the titular subject is shown reclining with its front paw extended in an indiscernible white space.

Hamaguchi's newfound artistic inspiration in Paris was interrupted by the start of World War II in 1939, and he subsequently returned to Japan.

Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Hamaguchi further refined his mezzotint style and became a popular figure among Japanese art collectors as mezzotint was not yet familiar in Japan and was still considered a predominantly Western medium.

Deemed a pioneer, the art world's enthusiasm for Hamaguchi's prints resulted in his first solo exhibition at the Formes Gallery in Tokyo in 1951.

Hamaguchi returned to France in 1953 to market his prints in the Parisian art scene.

By then, the majority of his new works were monochrome copperplate etchings executed in gray, black, and white such as Gypsies (1954).

His prints appealed to European collectors, and led to his acquisition of multiple prestigious awards in Japan, including the “Best Art Piece” at the Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan.

Concurrently, Hamaguchi became a member of the Salon d’Automne, an annual Parisian art exhibition that highlighted the latest developments in art, architecture, and design of the 20th century.

The year 1955 was a pivotal year in Hamaguchi's career as he revitalized mezzotint as a modern art medium and developed his signature style.

Originally completed in black and white, Hamaguchi began to insert vibrant colors into his mezzoint prints that imbued them with an energetic liveliness.

Moreover, he transformed his recognizable subjects of still life and city scenes into simplified, abstracted forms that took on entirely new visual meanings.

Roofs of Paris (1956) was one of Hamaguchi's first colored mezzotints, and the innovativeness of his style is evident in the windowless rectangular and trapezoidal buildings that appear stacked or positioned in seemingly infinite rows.

He employed non-localized colors as chimneys and edges of the roofs are depicted in blue, white, and light brown hues over blackened structures.

Every building appears to emerge from a blackened void, which is a recurring visual motif that pervades most of the prints Hamaguchi later completed.

Hamaguchi's success led to his participation in countless art exhibitions and major art festivals around the world for the remaining decades of his life.

His works attained global exposure after Hamaguchi participated in the prestigious São Paulo Biennale in Brazil (1957) and was included in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Italy (1960).

Hamaguchi's legacy is preserved in the Musee Hamaguchi Yozo that possesses much of his prints and it frequently organizes exhibitions centered on his printmaking, alongside works by his wife Keiko Minami and contemporary practitioners of mezzotint printmaking.

Hamaguchi was born in Hirogawa, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan to an upper-class family.

In 1957, he received the Grant Prize of the International Printmaking Division at the São Paulo Biennial for three prints: Fish and Fruits (1954), Sole (1956), and Two Slices of Watermelon (1954).

Hamaguchi had the prestigious honor to serve as a representative of the Japan Pavilion in the 1960 Venice Biennale.

Global enthusiasm for Hamaguchi's mezzotints led to his selection as the artist to design the official poster for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, to which he incorporated his print Cherries and Blue Bowl (1976).

Hamaguchi's first major retrospective exhibition in Japan was held in 1985 at the Tokyo Yurakucho Art Forum and The National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka.

His father, Gihei, was the 10th President of the Yamasa Corporation, a major soy sauce company.

Once considered a major printmaking medium in Europe throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, the influence and technological ingenuity of photography signaled the end of mezzotint printmaking as a modern reproducible form.

However, Hamaguchi valued its emphasis on tonality and texture as expressed in a work's lighting and tactile qualities.

By working in a European-born printing technique, Hamaguchi received praise from the European, American, and Japanese art centers for his distinct mezzotint printing methods and re-popularization of the long-ignored medium.