The Prints of Paul Jacoulet

Eldred, Robert C (2012-08-22). [www.artfactliveauctions.com The Prints of Paul Jacoulet]. Robert C. Eldred Co. Inc.

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Abstract: Edme Marie Eduard Paul Jacoulet was born in France on January 23, 1902. That same year his father went to Japan in response to a request from the Japanese government to the French government for a professor of French to serve as counselor to the Ministry of Education and teacher at Tokyo’s Imperial University. Paul and his mother did not follow until 1906. Presumably by that time his father had determined to make a life in Japan, and Paul, whose delicate health was always a worry, was considered strong enough for the trip. The family lived in a pleasant residential district of Tokyo, and Paul was raised in a manner not strikingly different from the way a rather privileged Japanese boy grew up. He attended Japanese elementary and middle schools and in them he learned to speak, read, and write Japanese with native fluency. One must emphasize the writing, for that meant learning to handle a brush. Once the technique of brushing the characters of the language is mastered - and in this Paul was given the benefit not only of regular schooling, but of special tutors - that technique is as applicable to painting a picture as to calligraphy. For most boys such training would have been torture; for Paul, it was a joy. In later years he was fond of telling how, according to his mother, he had at the age of one thrust aside toys to play with pencil and paper. He loved to draw, and since his poor health kept him out of boys’ games, he turned more and more to art. His parents did not stint him: he was tutored not only in Japanese brushwork, but in Western-style painting in oils and pastels. There were always tutors on the scene. His English tutor was the American wife of Yone Noguchi, and it was in their home as a boy of eight or nine that Jacoulet first saw the prints of Utamaro. It was the human form that always engaged Jacoulet. He returned day after day to copy Utamaro’s women to find the secret of his line. Then he discovered that prints could be bought, and his allowance went for them. He didn’t just buy, he studied, he compared, he analyzed the making of a print. Eventually he assembled a fine collection. As the boy grew up, he plunged deeper and deeper into Japanese culture. Kabuki, of course: some actors became lifelong friends; but kabuki was not a world he could enter as a participant. Joruri, the ballad-drama, was. On first hearing a joruri minstrel, Paul was entranced. Plunging in, he made himself so good at both the voice and the samisen accompaniment that some of the greatest performers were willing to accept him as student and disciple. In all this activity there was a common theme. Kabuki, joruri, the old prints - during the two and a half centuries of Japan’s seclusion, each of these had been part of the “floating world” of pleasure. It was this world, or the remnants of it, that cast a spell on Jacoulet. In 1920, faced with the decision of embarking on some kind of career, he took a position as interpreter with the French Embassy. He was well qualified, but the work left him with neither time nor energy for painting or joruri, and he always considered those years as an interpreter lost. The horror of the great earthquake in September 1923 forced him to the conclusion that life had better be lived while it could be, and he resigned. One suspects that he was free to do so because his father, who could not have approved of his resignation, had died earlier that year. Paul’s mother had returned to France to look after the estate. He gave private lessons in French, and he returned to art, troubled, as usual, by attacks of bronchitis. In 1929 Jacoulet met a lonely teenager from Truk (now "Chuuk"), a place which meant nothing to him until he looked it up. The boy’s mother was a native of that island, his father was French; they had sent him to Tokyo to school. For the next few months, until the boy returned home, Paul befriended him. The result was an invitation from the father to come to Truk for a visit. The thought of escaping a Tokyo winter delighted Jacoulet; his mother, who had returned from France, gave him passage money, and off he went. That was the first of eight consecutive winters he spent in the South Pacific. (That first year he took a fling at buying copra for a Japanese soap company, but he speedily realized he had no gift for business.) He was captivated by the islands. Truk, Yap, and Ponape (now "Pohnpei") of the Carolines; Saipan, Tinian, Rota, and Guam of the Marianas; the Marshalls; the Celebes - wherever he went, the people delighted him, the astonishingly different cultures amazed him, the sense that this loveliness was doomed haunted him. He picked up languages easily, he was accepted as a friend, he had a sharp eye for customs and folklore. He amassed sketches. Now he had subject matter which made him stand out. In 1934 writer Zoe Kincaid persuaded him to show some of his paintings in Tokyo. It was clear that he had developed a style of his own, and his friends among print collectors and scholars were quick to point out that that style was admirably suited to the design of woodblock prints. In the meantime, his mother had remarried and was living in Seoul. His visits with her resulted not only in his Korean prints, but also in his Manchurian and most of his Chinese designs. In his Manchurian prints and others even more lavish, the technique of the woodblock is pushed to the ultimate. In the days of the ukiyo-e prints, seven or eight blocks usually had to suffice; Jacoulet used as many as three hundred. Again and again he challenged his carver and his printer to outdo themselves, and he was generous in giving them credit. It almost goes without saying that he used the finest pigments and the finest paper made to order with his watermark. The war drove him from Tokyo to the mountain resort of Karuizawa. There he lived with his Korean family: two brothers who had been with him since their childhood, and the elder’s wife and children. In 1949 Jacoulet adopted their three-year-old daughter, Therese. Karuizawa was home for the rest of his life. There he found the quiet to work steadily and seriously, there he found an appreciative audience among members of the Occupation Force who came for holidays. The chronic ill health that plagued him all his life resulted in his death on March 9, 1960. He was only fifty-eight.

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MAG: 593122444
OpenAlex: W593122444
CorpusID: 182775322