Oct. 4, 2013–Jan. 1, 2014
Canaday Gallery
During the 1930s the Toledo Museum of Art introduced modern Japanese prints to American audiences with two landmark exhibitions. These seminal shows featured the works of 15 contemporary Japanese artists who had revived the traditional art of the woodblock print for a new era. Fresh Impressions: Early Modern Japanese Prints reassembles and reinterprets the 1930 show and adds companion objects depicted in the prints such as kimonos, Kabuki costumes, and samurai swords.
The Museum owns all but five of the 343 prints displayed in the exhibition, due to the generosity of local business leader H.D. Bennett. Another section of the show covers the period from 1936 to the present and explores the global influence of these Japanese printmakers. Fresh Impressions stresses the importance of the early 20th-century resurgence of woodblock printmaking in Japan—a phenomenon known as the shin hanga (“new print”) movement that combined traditional technique with Western inspiration—and showcases the Museum’s role in popularizing the genre in the United States and Japan. Free admission.