Hodaka Yoshida
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Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995), well-known artist, was a Japanese modernist who worked first in oils and then from 1950 in the woodblock print medium. His signature on works is usually in Western script and in the Western order, Hodaka Yoshida.
His father and mother, Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950) and Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987), were leading Western-syle artists in Tokyo in oils, watercolors, and from 1925 in shin hanga woodblock prints. Hodaka’s older brother, Toshi Yoshida (1911-1995), became the heir to the Yoshida studio, working in both oils and woodblock prints. Hodaka was destined to be a scientist, but as the Second World War ended, he defied his father’s wishes, becoming not only an artist, but one who focused on abstraction, a style his father disdained. Unlike others in the family, Hodaka’s art has an edgy feel to it and is quite complex.
Instead of having a straight line development, his work moved abruptly forward in a series of distinct periods. For example, his 1955 encounter in Mexico with primitive Pre-Columbian artifacts and architecture radically reoriented his purpose as an artist. A survey of his total range of work of about 600 prints over 45 years, reveals major changes in subject matter, vocabulary, style, and color pallet, with each period lasting from two to nine years. His styles, while always his own, drew from Expressionism, Pop, Photorealism, and Color Field abstraction. Broadly speaking most his prints would be sosaku hanga. The print technology Hodaka used was not limited to woodblock, but included monoprinting, wood engraving, copper etching, silkscreen, lithograph, and often employed photo transfer techniques. In this regard he was a leading pioneer in Japan in the 1960’s and 70’s. His subject matter was drawn from objects in cultures all around the world. In spite of these dynamics, each of Hodaka’s periods is an exploration in the same basic direction, into what might be called expressions of primitive human vitality. Individual prints show great artistry in composition and color.
In Chapter One of his book, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern, 1990, Kirk Varnedoe says that modern art has four basic characteristics: (1) the flattened image instead of the illusion of space, (2) fragmentation and repetition in the composition, rather than the complete object, (3) primitivism, in the sense of an artifact revealing something latent deep within ourselves, and (4) the flight of the mind, the freedom to assume any point of departure, or to conceptualize as one wishes. It is clear that Hodaka’s art exemplifies all four characteristics, and that he did this without suppressing his Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Hodaka clearly was a modern Japanese internationalist in his art, and as such he further broadened the artistic heritage of the Yoshida family.
He exhibited mainly in the major international art biennials. Hodaka received many awards and prizes, including the Purple Ribbon Decoration bestowed by the Emperor in 1990, and the Rising Sun Medal, Fourth Order, awarded by the Emperor posthumously in 1995.
Hodaka's wife, Chizuko Yoshida (nee Inoue) and their daughter Ayomi Yoshida (born 1958), are both artists, and their son Takasuke is an art jewelry maker.
[edit] References
- Homma Masayoshi “Yoshida Hodaka no hanga,” in Hangakan 8 (1984), 29-40
- Yoshida Hodaka Hangatan, Vol. 3, Shûzô sakka, Machida Shiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan, 1988
- Skibbe, Eugene M. Yoshida Hodaka: The Magic of Art, Seascape, 1997
- Allen, Laura, et al. A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2002.
