HASUI KAWASE

HASUI KAWASE

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah  

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Hasui Kawase (1883-1957) was a Japanese artist, famous for his wood block prints (from 1919). At the studio of Kiyokata Kaburagi, he concentrated on making watercolours of actors, everyday life and landscapes. Kawase also studied ukiyo-e and Japanese style painting. He worked almost exclusively on landscape and town scape prints, based on sketches he made in Tokyo and during travels around Japan. He travelled the Hokuriku, San'in, and San'yō regions later in 1923. He also produced oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls and a few byōbu (folding screens). He was one of the most prominent print designers of the shin-hanga (‘new prints’) movement.

Kawase's prints feature realist locales that are tranquil and obscure in urban Japan. His art combines both the Japanese traditions and essence of western art compositions. He rendered his scene in natural light and with low contrast. He had a liking for rains, snow and twilight of early evening.

 In 1956, the Japanese government’s Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage designated Zojo Temple in Snow, as Intangible Cultural Treasures. He was named a Living National Treasure in Japan..

 

FRANCIS CRISS

 

FRANCIS CRISS

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Feature ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Francis Criss, (1901-1973) was born in London, but based in America. He was a Precisionist painter, known for colourful portrayals of Manhattan urban scenes. Precisionism was a style of painting emerging after WW-I, strongly affected by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism. Precisionist artists (often called Immaculates), reduced the subjects to their essential geometric machine shapes, used fewer details, monotone colours and stiff forms as highlighted by crisp light and absence of human forms.

Criss said, ‘I attempt to capture the layers and depth of the city’s environment, not paint it brick by brick’. Lewis Mumford, compared Criss's oeuvre with that of Sheeler in terms of its dry accuracy, although he declared that it operated on a higher imaginative level.

Francis Criss painted surreal urban scapes with distorted perspectives and crude juxtaposition and odd contrasts. This was a post-war period, with new-age structures of bridges, elevated subway tracks, skyscrapers, factories. Yet. It was time of severe Economic. Social and Political depression.

Francis Criss was compared with Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and Ralston Crawford (1906-1978). Criss experimented with many different styles including, pointillism, cubism, realism, with art-form such as, portraits, collages from old photographs, commercial art and large format murals. 

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