On Tuesday, July 5, 2016 at 11.30am Joseph Gallivan interviews Maribeth Graybill of the Portland art Museum about Splashes of Color: Chinese Woodblock Prints from the You Wei Du Zhai Collection which runs June 25 through Oct 9, 2016.
Graybill will talk about the artistry involved in making color woodblock prints in the 1630s in southern China, and how the art from was transported to Japan, and later how the Chinese revived the skill in the 1930s, particularly for making high end stationary.
Maribeth Graybill is the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art.
From the press release:
Many Americans are familiar with Japanese woodblock prints, which have been widely collected in the West since they were first admired by the French Impressionists. Few realize that China has an older and equally sophisticated tradition of color printing, one that evolved along a very different path.
In Japan, prints developed as part of popular culture, especially the world of brothels and the kabuki theater. In China, the emphasis in color printing was on luxury goods for well-to-do intellectuals. These initially took the form of multi-volume books such as The Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting (1633) and The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1679–1701), filled with the classical subjects of Chinese painting: birds, flowers, figures, and landscapes. These volumes were reprinted repeatedly and would prove enormously influential in spreading a curiously skewed knowledge of Chinese painting throughout East Asia. In the 1880s, color woodblock printing was revived to create exquisite letter papers, which were cherished by the leading literati and artists of Beijing and beyond.
Drawn from the finest collection of this genre in the United States,Splashes of Color features more than 30 rare and historically important examples of books and letter papers, allowing Museum audiences to savor the full spectrum of the delights of Chinese color woodblock printing.
Curated by Maribeth Graybill, Ph.D., The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art.
Joseph Gallivan has been a reporter since 1990. He has covered music for the London Independent, Technology for the New York Post, and arts and culture for the Portland Tribune, where he is currently the Business Reporter. He is the author of two novels, "Oi, Ref!" and "England All Over" which are available on Amazon.com
This show was recorded at KBOO on July 2, 2016 and edited by KBOO volunteer Sam Parrish.
- KBOO