Worth A Look: Azechi Umetarō at Mia

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"Worth a Look" is a new series we're kicking off of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

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Visiting a familiar museum after a long hiatus can feel a bit like waking up at home to discover your furniture has been rearranged — most of your favorite stuff is still there, just not quite where you think it should be. On a recent visit to Mia after too many months away (save a laser-focused trip the week prior to catch Christopher Selleck’s beautifully photographed MAEP show, only up for two more weeks), I enjoyed the mild bouts of bewilderment the curators and staff had prepared for me. 

Wandering through the Impressionists, I was briefly worried that John Singer Sargent’s gorgeous pile of rocks, The Moraine — a piece I try to visit every time I come to the museum — had gone into storage, only to find it had been plucked from its usual corner and simply moved to the very next room. (Seriously, seek that one out. Look at it from a distance and then move closer and marvel at how all those wonderful little slaps of paint come in and out of focus to celebrate the morning sun on a great sea of stones. A magnificently unromantic landscape.)

 

John Singer Sargent, The Moraine, 1908. Oil on canvas. Myron Kunin Collection of American Art. Photo by the author.

 

I was also happy to see Van Gogh’s Olive Trees back in its usual spot between a Cezanne and a Gauguin, and a George Tooker I’d never seen before (the sweetly strange The Artist’s Daughter) made up for the absence of his Supermarket, one of my favorites from the Kunin Collection rooms.

My mission to Mia that Saturday morning (which was not crowded at all, almost all to yourself on a nice summer day) was to track down a room full of Judiths, helmed as it is by Caravaggio’s great bloody take on the apocryphal Hebrew heroine. It did not disappoint. The hands, the arms, the fabrics, the expressions. Go see that too, before it leaves at the end of August, and if you have the time, do like one gentleman did: borrow one of Mia’s folding stools and park yourself in front of the thing for a good long look.

It’s a tough act to follow, as the other artists’ Judiths can attest, even as some of them bare their chests or hold Holofernes’s head aloft in a classic Perseus and Medusa switcheroo. But wander on I did, and then there it was, in between the Japanese Period Rooms and the auditorium entrance: a small, exquisite show of mid-20th century woodblock prints by Azechi Umetarō. Absolutely worth a look.

Born in 1902 on Japan’s smallest island, Umetarō made a career for himself as a printmaker, and this collection of works from the 1950s and ‘60s is a delight. Umetarō was an avid mountain-climber, and here he translates that world of jagged landscapes and rugged people into bold, color-blocked shapes, each cartoonish character standing dead center for their portrait. An old man with pink lips and a small pipe stares back at us with crossed arms and a white scarf encircling his stylized face. The colors are flat, but this little caricature has tremendous depth.

 

Azechi Umetarō, Old Man in a Mountain Hut, 1953. Woodblock print, ink and color on paper, Gift of Sue Y.S. Kimm and Seymour Grufferman. Photo by the author.

 

The prints are illustrative and good-natured and beautifully crafted, presenting these gruff outdoorsmen as funny fellows with earnest eyes, sweet demeanors, and graphic black stripes for stubble. They almost look like concept sketches for Muppets. Another man, dressed head to toe in black against a mottled blue background, cheerfully grasps a striped bird; he stands with a simple wood-grained rifle, so you wonder if perhaps this isn’t a hunter out picking up his kill. Then you read the title: Rescued Bird (Tasukatta tori) — about as wholesome as it gets. Seek this little show out; descriptions don’t do the prints justice.

 

Azechi Umetarō, Rescued Bird (Tasukatta tori), 1957. Woodblock print, ink and color on paper, Gift of Sue Y.S. Kimm and Seymour Grufferman. Photo by the author.

 

And while we’re on the subject of Japanese woodcuts and European Impressionists, did you know that some of the biggest names in 19th century Western painting totally ripped off the Japanese printmakers whose work had begun circulating through France and elsewhere in the mid-1800s? Check out the Met’s 1974 book The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints for some amazing side-by-side comparisons of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other big names against woodblock prints by earlier Japanese artists. There are even some super famous Mary Cassatt pieces in there that are straight up one-to-one with some 18th century Kitagawa Utamaro prints. Who’s to say how much theft is too much when it comes to cultural cross-pollination; I’m just saying you gotta give credit where credit’s due.

All that to say, go check out the Umetarō show, on view through January of next year. Honorable mention should also go to Teo Nguyen’s Việt Nam Peace Project, which is only up through June 18. If you can find a couple spare hours, just go have yourself a wander. Old friends and new await. ◼︎

 

Azechi Umetarō: Call of the Mountains is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 21, 2024, in Galleries 226 & 227. 

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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.