Pacific Print: Margaret Preston and the Australian ukiyo-e

The painting and printmaking of the Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston (1875–1963) blend European, Australian, and Japanese artistic techniques and subject matter, providing a critical index of the modern transformation of global geopolitical power. As an artist who trained in several cultural centers but who lived most of her life in Sydney, Preston developed an acutely critical disposition toward imperial geopolitical formations as the old faded and the new emerged in the mid-twentieth century. In 1942 she described the choice Australian art and culture would be required to make, situated at the corner of a triangle: “the East, as represented by China, India and Japan, will be at one point, and the other will have the United States of America representing the West.”[1] Preston saw the danger in following the art of the United States: its techniques were familiar and easily absorbed but at the risk of mere imitation. Crucially it was her turn east (geographically north from an Australian perspective) that stimulated her reorientation of artistic priorities and influences in the Australian scene.

Preston’s experimentation with Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking techniques, and their adaptation to Australian subjects—distinctive flora and fauna as well as architecture—distinguishes her within Australian art. The fashion for Japonisme arrived in Australian art from Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, reaching a high point in the 1920s and 1930s. Such artists as Ethel Spowers, Paul Haefliger, Thea Proctor, and Ethleen Palmer absorbed printmaking techniques while studying and working in London and Paris.[2] Palmer was known as the “Australian Hokusai” due to her technique of reusing linocuts with different inks rather than printing in black and hand-coloring the image.[3] Preston’s mastery of these techniques, allied with her sensitivity in the use of subject matter, gives her a singular artistic status. Where her contemporaries may have been satisfied with the aesthetic opportunities bestowed by Japanese art, Preston was aware of the critical potency in bringing Western and Japanese art into dialogue. She saw the potential for transcultural aesthetics to bear witness to neo-colonial power, including the exercise of such power towards the Indigenous population in her own country. Her work is positioned geographically and historically at the nexus of the waning empires of Britain and Japan, and the economic powerhouses of the United States and a rapidly transformed post-imperial Japan.[4] Preston’s acute perception that global geopolitical change bears implications for artistic production—and that art can inform and probe the implications of these changes—gives her painting and printmaking a singular decolonizing force in modernist art.[5] She accomplishes this from a critical position at the periphery both of established spheres of global cultural production in Britain and the United States, and of emergent spheres in Japan and East Asia.

Margaret Preston’s status as a pioneering modernist in Australian art history is founded upon her pedigree: she studied under Frederick McCubbin—a pivotal member of Australia’s first major art movement, the Heidelberg School—at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1893–94,[6] before opening her own studio while completing her studies at the Adelaide School of Design, Painting, and Technical Art. Stella Bowen was one of her students.[7] Following a short stint in Munich, Preston spent much of 1904–07 in London and Paris, participating in the Paris salons of 1905 and 1906. In Paris Preston was exposed to the art of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and others, as well as the Japanese collection in the Musée Guimet (Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts).[8] During World War I Preston moved to England where she enrolled in classes under Roger Fry at the Omega Workshops, studying ceramics and design. She attended an exhibition of Abbott Thayer’s paintings at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh en route to Sydney in 1919, and met Bill Preston on the voyage home, whom she married on December 31. Preston spent the rest of her life in Sydney, alternating between the harbor suburb of Mosman and the bush suburb of Berowra in the city’s northern reaches, taking on a leading role in the Australian artistic avant-garde.[9]

Preston’s Parisian education was heavily influenced by the pronounced Japonisme of the later nineteenth century: the orientalism on display in such paintings as James McNeill Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1865), James Tissot’s Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects (1869), Claude Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny (1899), Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887) with his own imitations of ukiyo-e in the background, and the same artist’s Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige) (1887)—an imitation of Hiroshige’s famous ukiyo-e 亀戸梅屋舗 Plum Park in Kameido (1857), complete with van Gogh’s own kanji approximations, innocent of any calligraphic expertise, framing the arboreal scene.[10] Japonisme entered popular consciousness more widely in Europe by way of museum exhibitions—such as the British Museum’s Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings in 1888 and the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910 in White City, London—as well as furniture design, popular musicals—Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885)—and opera—Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904).[11] Preston took this renewed contact with the culture of Japan a step further. She made a serious attempt to bring the artistic traditions of Japan into conversation with those of the West, and to address the ways culture and art apprehends national and global politics. Further, she deployed traditional techniques of ukiyo-e—developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Japan—to reframe Western considerations of Japanese culture as lagging in technology and infrastructure.

Preston expended considerable energy learning the techniques of ukiyo-e printing, adapting conventions of tone, color, mass, and pictorial balance in prints made on Japanese paper. She followed the Japanese technique by printing in black and hand-coloring her prints rather than printing with multiple color blocks, and printing by hand rather than by press. Preston began her study of Japanese techniques in London and furthered her expertise on a visit to Kyoto in 1934 where she studied woodcutting techniques with the son of the ukiyo-e master Hiroshige.[12] Her adaptation of these techniques to Australian themes signals something much more than the influences of Japonisme. Rather Preston sought to understand ukiyo-e on its own terms, and to turn its qualities to questions of the representation of Australian natural and cultural subjects. In this sense, she took her art well beyond the intellectual constraints of Japonisme, performing a transcultural conversation that takes its multiple parts equally seriously. Preston invented a Western perspective on Japanese art that asks more complex questions of Japan and the West than anything attempted by Whistler, Tissot, Monet, or van Gogh. Her critical turn to Japanese techniques stands in stark contrast to much of Australian modernist art of her time, which remained primarily beholden to French and British influences or else remained content with imitating Japanese techniques and forms. This provided Preston with an aesthetic repertoire and critical disposition well suited to her geopolitical perspective, situated within the purview of the waning British Empire and the emergent hegemonic power of the United States but at their geographic peripheries. Several examples of her art from this time illustrate how this location offered Preston strategies to critique the uses of political and cultural power, including persistent colonial residues traumatizing Indigenous populations in her own nation.

Preston’s 1939 print The Banksia Tree combines non-European techniques with an uncanny sense of familiarity. For viewers conversant in Japanese art, the print follows the classic ukiyo-e formula of thick lines and heavy hatching, a pictorial balance with the tree occupying the central vertical space, and vivid contrasts of color kept to a simple combination of blue, white, and black. It is printed on Japanese paper, evident in the texture visible at the bottom of the print and the penciled numbering and signature. To an Australian viewer, once the sense of visual estrangement has been reconciled, the image is immediately obvious as a native tree, the Banksia prionotes, named after the botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the Pacific in 1768–71. The giveaway is the presence of the distinctive cones—one of which is painted red—the seeds of which attract various colourful and noisy bird species such as the rainbow lorikeet.[13] The vivid colors often associated with such scenes in Australian art are reduced to something resembling a silhouette, as though painted at dawn or dusk, but retaining a distinctive mass and presence in the cones.

A Japanese viewer, on the other hand, might consider the distribution of objects in the pictorial space and recall Hiroshige’s Plum Park in Kameido, the thirtieth print in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo published in 1857. Vincent van Gogh’s famous imitation of Hiroshige’s print in 1887 is distinctive for his impression of kanji calligraphy, resembling the branches of the tree as much as written language. This visual effect may reflect the attitude of many writers and artists of the time that East Asian writing was more “natural” because it more closely resembled physical forms of the things it represented—a view that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found especially alluring. Preston may well have seen van Gogh’s painting, or reproductions of it during her extended time in Europe, but any echo of his artwork in her Banksia Tree is secondary to her direct apprehension of Japanese print techniques.

Circular Quay is one of the earliest examples of ukiyo-e technique in Preston’s art, taking as its subject Sydney’s maritime transport terminal. Heavy lines mark out the stone buildings and the movement and reflections on the water, and the hand-colored palette is kept to black, red, green, and light ochre. The scene—anterior to such iconic infrastructure as the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932), the Cahill Expressway (1958), and the Sydney Opera House (1973)—is made strange by virtue of the style of its presentation, right down to the mulberry paper on which it was printed. Warehouses and maritime traffic speak to a time of industry, when Circular Quay was a working port rather than a transit hub and focal point for the tourism industry as it is today. Such scenes were popular subjects for painting at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Camille Pissarro’s Déchargement de bois, quai de la Bourse, coucher de soleil [Unloading Timber, Quai de la Bourse, Sunset] (1898), or the depiction of lower Manhattan in George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912). This makes Preston’s image particularly appropriate for representation as ukiyo-e, emulating many of the early prints of Yokohama’s emergent role as a major port following the end of sakoku (the policy of closure to foreign affairs or kaikin) in 1853. Many of these Yokohama-e demonstrate the working nature of the port, such as Utagawa Kunisada’s print of the first steam train leaving Yokohama in 1872.

The historic link between ukiyo-e printing techniques and the material signs of an emergent modernity is grounded in the forced opening of the Japanese nation and its economy in the 1850s. The ensuing phase of Japonisme provided a reservoir of preindustrial cultural imagery for Western artists and writers, from Noh theater and haiku to Buddhist temples and ukiyo-e. Modernist writers and artists in Europe and North America tended to disregard or downplay the implications of Japan’s rapid industrialization following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, even when the Japanese avant-garde responded to epochal change by assimilating the formal vocabularies of modernism, such as in the Mavo movement. Mavo started out in the early 1920s with roots in Futurist and Dada aesthetics, but rapidly transformed its focus on individual expression to a critique of Japanese industrial capitalism begun in the Meiji Restoration.[14] Japanese modernism tended to turn away from traditional materials and techniques, but for Preston, these techniques offered a way to comment upon industrial modernity as it gave shape to the rapidly modernizing city of Sydney and its harbor. Her 1932 print of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Japanese laid paper was made only weeks after the bridge had opened to great fanfare and controversy on March 19, when Francis de Groot, a member of the right wing New Guard, rushed up on horseback and cut the ceremonial ribbon with a sword, proclaiming the bridge open to the people of New South Wales before the state Labor premier Jack Lang had the opportunity to do so.[15] Preston’s print may be the first artistic representation of one of Australia’s most famous cultural icons. The scene is made more complex by virtue of the cross-hatched housing and stone buildings, recalling scenes from sixteenth-century England or the Low Countries, and the leafless tree in the foreground signifying itself as an imported species rather than a local perennial. This iconography recalls the stark branches of cherry and plum trees in winter ukiyo-e scenes: Preston has managed to create a composite image of Australian iconography, European architecture, and Japanese nature in a remarkably subtle and harmonious scene.

Preston’s postwar landscape prints, such as Manly Pines, combine iconic representations of Australian scenery and elements from Japanese aesthetics. Painted pines appear on the back wall of the Noh stage, and figure abundantly on the paper walls of Zen temples and royal palaces. Pine trees also comprise the central symbolic and architectural function in Japanese gardens. Preston’s scene is not dominated by pines: the Norfolk Pines are instead visible in the far distance, and the eye is led to them by virtue of the relation of land and water snaking up from below to the horizon. The eye is first captivated by quite another object of nature, the Gymea lily (Doryanthes excelsa) with its extravagant flower spike topped with bright flowers. Preston again immediately identifies her landscape as Australian, yet the strong analogies with elements of Japanese garden aesthetics bring two ecologies and modes of visual representation together into productive commerce. This suggests Preston’s keen awareness of the role of botanical imagery in matters of national identity, put into productive relation in this stencil by combining Japanese visual techniques with Australian botanical imagery.

Preston’s aesthetic critique of cultural and racial segregation assumes heightened significance when historical circumstances are taken into account. Manly Pines marks a return to ukiyo-e printmaking after World War II, but during the war Preston turned to oils and canvas in a series of politically charged images that sought to question the forthright nature of Australian wartime patriotism. Her 1942 painting Japanese Submarine Exhibition dramatizes the cognitive dissonance of war. In May and June of that year three Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour in an attempt to sink the USS Chicago—a United States Navy vessel serving in the Pacific theater—but instead torpedoed a ferry, HMAS Kuttabul, killing 21 sailors.[16] Two midget submarines were captured—not before a further 50 Australian sailors were killed in attacks on merchant vessels over several months—and a third was eventually recovered in 2006. Preston represents the exhibition of one of the captured submarines on Fort Denison, an island in Sydney Harbour commandeered by the navy during the war. The site was used as a jail as well as a defense outpost in the colonial era and later was transformed into a tourist site: the souvenir shop is visible in the lower right corner of the image. The scene depicts the submarine under armed guard, a trophy of a repelled invasion—indeed the only military invasion Australia has suffered aside from the European colonization and Indigenous dispossession at its founding—as well as evidence of the realities of warfare in the Pacific Theater indicated by the battleship in the background. The most intriguing element of the scene is the signage in front of the submarine: “Do not ask questions.” The object is put on display for public view, but questions regarding the fate of the submariners, the ideologies of opposing military powers, or even matters of information are seemingly prohibited. Australia’s propensity to self-congratulation for a century of “fighting for freedom” comes up against an uncomfortable moment of military secrecy or censorship, all set in the context of Australian ports and other strategic infrastructure having been commandeered by the United States Navy during the war. Preston’s image can be read as a critique of warfare and its effects upon the liberties of citizens in even the more liberal democracies. The commitment to cultural exchange and empathy evident in her prints makes this painting—oil on canvas, the material of classic western painting—a kind of elegy for what war has torn away from art and human understanding.

Preston turned this critique of political violence and nationalist intolerance to the dark history of her own country. From the 1920s she had written extensively on the immense richness of Indigenous Australian art and was the first major artist to promote its repertoire of techniques and modes of representation.[17] Her postwar adaptation of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis deliberates on Australian race relations—not in the style of ukiyo-e but as a hand-colored stencil. The Indigenous Adam and Eve are expelled in a state of anguish from a paradise complete with kangaroos, koalas, eucalyptus trees, and native grasses. They are clothed not by virtue of their shame at having eaten from the tree of knowledge, but by the colonizer. The locked gate and picket fence provide unsettlingly familiar emblems of dispossession—suburban private property—as well as the colonizer’s disregard of Indigenous spiritual connection with the land. The visual iconography echoes the symbolism of William Blake’s poem “The Garden of Love,” affirming the viewer’s sympathies with the Indigenous outcasts. The angel, European, has his back turned to the native paradisal ecology and wields the ultimate power of arbitration to which the victims have no avenue of appeal. The flora outside of the locked gate includes a Scottish thistle (Onopordum acanthium), an emblem of hardiness designed to withstand the predations of grazing animals, and Sturt’s desert pea (Swainsona formosa) which grows in arid climates—formosa derives from the Latin for “beautiful” and is also the Portuguese name by which Taiwan was long known to Europeans. This combination of native and introduced floral species in a land of dispossession contrasts with the native plants sequestered behind the fortifications. Preston provides a clue in this stencil drawing similar to those in several of her prints: foregrounding a native plant to signify Australian ecology and place. Here though, it is a locus of cruelty, dispossession, and violence, a question hanging over the legitimacy of the national project itself, the stain of history that cannot be erased.

Margaret Preston’s experiments with ukiyo-e demonstrate her adept technical facility and her sensitivity to their aesthetic and geopolitical implications. These acts of homage to Japanese printmaking combine with her own iconographic creativity to produce objects that speak across cultures and artistic traditions, both in their subject matter and in their physical properties. Her cross-cultural experiments respond to the darkening pressures of history, using the techniques of Western art to question articulations of power in the modern nation state in a time of war, and expressing a commitment to peace and genuine cross-cultural understanding. Her attention to Indigenous dispossession at a time when the first Australians were yet to be counted in the national census reinforces Preston’s political courage and its manifestation in her artistic expression. From ukiyo-e to civil rights, Preston’s prints and colored stencils provide a fascinating narrative of Japanese-Australian relations over the first half of last century, and an acute awareness of the changing geopolitical forces to which her own country was subject. The European colonial project was finally eclipsed in World War II, and Australia’s diplomatic and economic attentions were turned emphatically to the Pacific.

Preston occupies a pivotal place in Australian art history by virtue of her reorientation towards the Asia-Pacific region in both technique and subject matter. Drawing on her education in Western European artistic techniques and in the Japonisme to which she gained exposure in Paris, Preston placed those traditions under the pressure of critique. Her ukiyo-e prints, stencils, and oil paintings demand reflection upon the ideological burdens of specific artistic repertoires, with wider implications for modernism generally. Western modernists largely saw Asia as a reservoir of preindustrial traditions from which certain affective forces could be extracted, based on such notions as balance, ceremony, and quietism, using a palette of stark images, simple gestures, and primary colors. In recent decades the significance of Japan and China in Western modernism has been duly amplified and situated near the aesthetic center of artistic production, especially in London and Paris before World War I. Conversely, greater awareness of Japanese avant-garde poetry, collage, performance art, and other forms now gives Japan a seat at the modernist table from the 1920s onward. Yet for all their progressive attunements to an emergent global modernism, these recent alignments and modifications tend to concede the geopolitical frameworks through which modernist art and literature is understood. Preston’s art provides a radical critique of these frameworks, afforded by her complex position at the geographic periphery of empires but with privileged access to their discourses of power.