THE B-A-SI6 DIF F E RE N С О F

BETWEEN CHINESE AND JAPANESE
COLOUR PIUNTi-N-в pR/MT-i

The two varieties of the Far-Eastern polychrome woodcut j

print, the Chinese and the Japanese, diverge д^ѴісіНуі //

and technically as much as Chinese and Japanese painting. v> J

Although Japanese painting is a descendant of the Chinese
model and therefore shares many of its ideas and rules, the (

accomplished painting reveals here as there the attitudefto /"mWicíJí

each culture. The uninitiated at first see what is obviously r

common to both of them, thus for many people Chinese and
Japanese art^Chinesc and Japanese colour prints seem more /
or less the same and are often ^asdy| confused. л

No mention of Chinese colour prints is made in Europe h4 <0
before 1907 while Japanese prints have been known in the
West since 1862 and have been collected enthusiastically
since that time. Hence, good and reliable explanations of
the Japanese technique art available. The technique of the
Chinese colour print, however, remained obscure until, in
I953>’ the author of this ^mall-book? succeeded in unveiling, /—/ (bvhclt
for the first time, the most important secret of the Chinese
colour printing technique, the Registering of Subsequent
Colours.

A Chinese colour print] is invariably the rendering of an
ink or watercolour painting. Although it possesses all the

charms of what we call an artist’s proof, it is no such tiling.

The Chinese woodcutter, a highly skilled worker, is no rj

artist. He has to follow the painting slavishly in the most
accurate manner. Thc$ Chinese?paintings/normally consist Jfttòdfj
of^colour brush strokes ef-varymg-stze- without dark linear
contours. At most, the veins of a leaf may be jcndcrcj in ^

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104

who makes multi-colour wood blocks, registers the different
colours, rcmaimj a mystery even to the expert artist. N0^

ТГІѴТГ in tin m.-.* 'I''. iiiIiji i*»n informa¬
tion] available. [Mofrtj learned people who have concerned ^

themselves with Chinese graphic art have formed their own, fit r

sometimes widely divergent, theories about it, hi

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_ and have even doubted that wood cutting was a part

of the process. This was, however, ^proved by Chinese

afiruCòy

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authorities, who indeed call them "‘wood'tnts.» indeed-they-
-iHfe-ent-ifebydifferent-from-thc-ÆOiw-eiitionalj’Chmcse colour
printij stencil prints or hand-coloured black prints, but these
are easily recognisable.

The painter End! Orlik, who travelled in China in 1912
and saw Chinese wood block printers at work in Shanghai,
Su-<¿hou and Hong-Cjjiow, omitted, although profession¬
ally interested, to describe exactly the techniques he observed.
He says in his piece ‘Chinesische Farbcndrul¡?e’ nothing
more than: ‘The “registering”, foe takmg-foj the colour and

4

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so on, is all done with a self-explanatory carelessness, which
is in the greatest contrast to Japanese exactitude’. But the best,
at least, of the Chinese prints arc not carelcsj ««d primitive.

Left figli. Tht^Chinese ■euttmfudge^ii
I Right fiigfj- Thyjjapanese *Htting*dger-]i J S'J W

p frt

II WO ÌÌC-u:tUr's ¡Chi ft.

У О 1>СГ, 4U\'C t. YC

13

Г j- j-Urc.

7

Pij. bufi /

Two pages of the English translation with
corrections in Tschichold's hand. On the
last page he wrote: 'The whole was
"edited", "translated", and composed by
imbeciles. J.T.'

105