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Paper short abstract

Examining the development of linocut and lithography in early twentieth-century Japan, this paper traces their emergence through international exchange. It argues that these techniques functioned as politically charged material choices for negotiating artistic ideologies and hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

Modern Japanese printmaking was characterized by considerable technical diversity. Nevertheless, scholarly attention has long privileged the woodblock, seen as the most “authentically Japanese” mode of expression. This paper shifts the focus to non-woodblock printing techniques such as linocut and lithography, which entered Japanese print practice in the early twentieth century through international artistic exchange. By examining networks of exhibition, circulation, and collaboration, it contends that the adoption of these technical innovations constituted a deliberate material choice, one that signaled artists’ positions within debates over art and politics.

The paper traces a series of encounters through which linocut and lithography entered and developed within Japanese printmaking. In 1920, Pavel Liubarsky’s linocuts made their way from Russian Far East to Japan as part of David Burliuk and Viktor Palmov’s Futurist touring exhibition. The medium’s relative technical simplicity, emphasis on direct carving, and association with leftist thought resonated with Japanese artists such as Ono Tadashige and Okada Tatsuo, for whom linocut offered both a practical and ideological alternative to mainstream print production. A second formative moment followed in 1922 with the arrival of Varvara Bubnova, who worked in both linocut and lithography and introduced the idea of lithography as an artistic medium to Japanese artistic circles. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the postwar development of lithography through the American printer Arthur Flory’s year-long lithographic workshop in Tokyo, considering both its pedagogical framework and its diplomatic significance.

By foregrounding linocut and lithography as sites of technical experimentation and political positioning, this paper complicates prevailing narratives that privilege woodblock printmaking. Attending to material processes and their transnational transmission reveals how printing techniques functioned as tools for negotiating artistic ideologies and hierarchies.