NewsGreenwich Academy

Japanese Woodblocks and AmeriCares Photographs On Display at Greenwich Academy
Posted: February 24, 2006

The walls of the Wallace Performing Art Center at Greenwich Academy are filled with two very different types of artwork through the month of March. In the Luchsinger Gallery is an exquisite display of thirty Japanese woodblock prints from masters including Ando Hiroshige, Utagawa Kunisada, Kitagawa Utamaro and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. On loan from a number of galleries around the United States, the exhibit curated by former Academy parent Dorianne Samuels, features pieces from the early 19th to the mid-20th century as an introduction to Japanese woodblock prints and as an illustration of Japonisme, the influence of Japanese art on European artists. In his reference book Japonisme, author Siegfried Wichmann notes, "The impact of Japan on Western art was as immediate and almost as cataclysmic as the influence of the West on Japanese life. After Commodore Perry opened Japan's door to the outside world in 1858-ending a 200-year period of total isolation-a wealth of visual information from the superb Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork and architecture, as well as printmaking, reached the West and brought with it electrifying new ideas of composition, color and design. One has only to see a celebrated painting by Monet, Degas, Whistler or van Gogh, a print by Lautrec, an Art Nouveau glass vase or a lacquered hair comb side by side with its Japanese source to see how these ideas have inspired European artists."
GA's Visual Arts Chair Sherry Tamalonis noted, "The woodblock prints use large blocks of color, a flattened way of showing perspective and a cropped composition. These characteristics and others presented in the woodblock prints were very appealing to the Impressionist artists of Paris in the late nineteenth century. They were a deviation from the conventions of art at the time."

In stark contrast to the woodprints, an exhibit of color photographs from world events, complied by AmeriCares, is on display in the Jacobs Lobby. Each of the diverse 18 photographs depicts the challenges of responding to global catastrophes by this local Connecticut agency during 2005. "The show is a natural complement to the Brunswick School-sponsored Fundance Film Festival that was held in Massey Theater during a weekend in February, which also brought to the campus ideas and images from all over the world, " added Sherry Tamalonis.