I t’s easy to see why a curator, or any art lover, might get fixated on the craft and beauty of Japanese woodblock prints, to the exclusion of any wider context. This genre, which first flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, takes you into a bright, bold world away from cares – a “floating world” no less – and has been lovingly continued over the last century by different generations of the Yoshida family. Yet a telltale mistake in a caption and catalogue entry betrays this show’s dangerous disdain for the filthy mess of reality beyond art’s enchanted garden.
Looking at Yoshida Tōshi’s 1985 print Camouflage, in which two lethal, gorgeous tigers are almost completely hidden by a tangle of golden grass, you are cheerfully told by Dulwich Picture Gallery that it was inspired by his “travels in Africa in the 1970s and 80s”. One problem: tigers don’t live in Africa. A trivial mistake? Maybe.
But it shows what this exhibition finds to be trivial: namely, everything outside its narrowly defined subject of one family’s artistic creations and the skills they have cherished. Camouflage itself suggests the bigger, badder “tiger” of history this show ignores. Instead of an irrelevant trip to tiger-free Africa, the title surely points to a military meaning.
The abstract jungle in which this tiger hides might make you think of the Pacific islands, where Japanese and American soldiers camouflaged themselves in forests and undergrowth in some of the bitteres.
