page_title: Kanae Yamamoto (artist)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Kanae Yamamoto (artist) / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 山本鼎記念館English: Museum Kanae Yamamoto in Nagano prefecture, Japan.
context_page_description: Kanae Yamamoto was a Japanese artist, known primarily for his prints and yōga Western-style paintings. He is credited with originating the sōsaku-hanga movement, which aimed at self-expressive printmaking, in contrast to the commercial studio systems of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga. He initiated movements in folk arts and children's art education that continue to be influential in Japan.
  Kanae trained as a wood engraver in the Western style before studying Western-style painting. While at art school he executed a two-colour print of a fisherman he had sketched on a trip to Chiba. Its publication ignited an interest in the expressive potential of prints that developed into the sōsaku-hanga movement. Kanae spent 1912 to 1916 in Europe and brought ideas back to Japan gleaned from exhibitions of peasant crafts and children's art in Russia. In the late 1910s he founded movements the promotion of creative peasant crafts and in children's art education; the latter quickly gained adherents but was suppressed under Japan's growing militarism. These ideas experienced a revival after World War II.
context_section_description: When an idea excited him he would bury himself in it.  Sacrifice meant nothing.  It was the same with creative hanga, his school, and his free-art movement.  He was a selfless man, a passionate man, a man of great sensitivity.  I guess if I had to describe him in one word it would be—artist.
  — Ishii Tsuzurō, Interview in Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn (1959)
  Kanae's European work had an immediate effect on artists of his generation.  In them Kōshirō Onchi saw the potential of the woodcut medium, though his style owes more to European artists. Un'ichi Hiratsuka came to believe "a real artist ... must cut his own blocks and do his own printing" as "Dürer and Bewick worked".  Sōsaku-hanga artists followed Kanae's lead in using a curved chisel to carve out planes rather than to define lines as in Japanese tradition.
  The dating of most of Kanae's work is uncertain.  It is believed that the works he signed in Roman characters were made after he returned to Japan from Europe.  The number of copies of Kanae's prints is unknown; it is supposed the subscription prints he made in Europe numbered around 25 to 50.  Kanae made few printings of the Fisherman print—perhaps only one or two—and none have survived.  The Ishiis discovered the block in their house decades later, and Oliver Statler had Hashimoto Okiie made forty copies of a commemorative edition in 1960.
  Modern Japanese thought on art education begins with Kanae's Free Drawing Education approach.  His stature in the history of child art and art education is similar to that of Franz Cižek's in the West.  Elementary schools teachers took to his ideas quickly in the wake of their dissatisfaction with the New Textbooks of Drawing textbooks the government had mandated in 1910 that emphasized copying and neglected personal expression.  Yamamoto's was the first public criticism of the textbooks, and his methods led to a sharp decline in their use in the 1920s.  Yamamoto encouraged teachers to take children outdoors to sketch, a practice that continues to be common in Japanese elementary schools.  Though Japanese militarism put his ideas on hold from the late 1920s educators revived and expanded them beginning in the 1950s.
  The municipal Kanae Yamamoto Memorial Museum in Ueda in Nagano Prefecture dates from 1962.  It houses 1,800 items, including artwork and documents by Kanae and early examples of peasant crafts and children's artwork done under his instruction.
caption: The Kanae Yamamoto Memorial Museum in Ueda, Nagano
exif: {"Image Make": "CASIO COMPUTER CO.,LTD.", "Image Model": "EX-Z88", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "1.00", "Image DateTime": "2012:05:12 08:52:04", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "2292", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "10518", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4309", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/100", "EXIF FNumber": "79/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "64", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:05:12 08:52:04", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2012:05:12 08:52:04", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "0/0", "EXIF ApertureValue": "1491/250", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "297/100", "EXIF MeteringMode": "MultiSpot", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "47/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4320", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3240", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "10394", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "26", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "4086"}