Tetsuya Noda

Tetsuya Noda (野田 哲也, Noda Tetsuya, born 5 March 1940) is a contemporary artist and printmaker.^[1] He is a professor emeritus of the Tokyo University of the Arts.^[2] Noda specializes in artwork done as a series of woodblock, print, and silkscreened diary entries that capture moments in daily life. Noda is the nephew of Hideo Noda an oil painter and muralist.^[3]

Early life, family and education

Noda was born in the Uki, Kumamoto Prefecture, on 5 March 1940. From 1959 to 1963, he studied painting and fine arts at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.^[4] Noda was a student of Tadashige Ono in the art of woodblock printmaking.

In June 1971, Noda married Dorit Bartur, daughter of the Israeli ambassador to Japan.^[5]

Career

Before 1980

At the age of 28, Noda won the International Grand Prize at the Tokyo International Print Biennale for diptych Dairy: August 22, 196 and Diary: September 11, 1968.^[6] In 1976, Noda was a judge at the 5th British International Biennial of Print in England. From 1978, Noda taught at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 1978, Noda was a guest artist at the University of Alberta.

1990s

• Noda became a professor at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1991.
• Noda was an International judge at the Seoul International Biennial of Print in 1996.
• Noda taught as a guest artist at University of Canberra Arts and Design in 1990 and at Columbia University in the City of New York in 1998.

2000s

• On March 31, 2007, Noda resigned his post as a professor of Printmaking at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.^[7]
• Noda was an International judge at the 2nd Guanlan International Print Biennial in China 2009.
• Noda became Professor Emeritus of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.^[2]
• From December 2010 to January 2011, Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs dispatched Noda to Israel and England for a cultural exchange. Noda taught Japanese woodblock printmaking at London Metropolitan University, England.^[8][9][10]

Public collections

• The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo^[11]
• The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto^[11]
• The National Museum of Art, Osaka^[11]
• Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo^[12]
• Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama^[13]
• Mie Prefectural Art Museum^[4]
• MoMA^[14]
• The Art Institute of Chicago^[15]
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ^[16]
• Achenbach Fondation for Graphic Art, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco^[17]
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art^[18]
• British Museum^[19]

Major exhibitions and awards

• 1968 6th International Grand Prize at the Tokyo International Print Biennale^[20]
• 1971 Bienal Internacional de Artes de São Paulo
• 1972 La Biennale di Venezia (International Graphic)
• 1974 5th Międzynarodowego Bienal Grafiki – Kraków Łódź museum award (Kraków, Poland)^[4]
• 1976 Ikeda Masuo, Arakawa Shusaka, Noda Tetsuya - an invitation to Japanese prints of the twentieth century from the Howard and Caroline Porter Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, Decemter 7, 1975-February 29, 1976.^[21]
• 1977 Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts; Grand prix^[4]
• The Mechanized Image : Historical perspective on 20th century (Exhibition Tour in England by Arts Council of Great Britain)
• 1978 4th Norwegian International Print Biennale ; Grand Prix^[4]
• 1980 Printed Art: A View of Two Decades (MoMA)
• 1983 Japanese Print Since 1900 (British Museum)
• 1986 10th British International Print Biennale (Bradford Art galleries and Museums, Bradford, England) ; Museum Friendship Award^[4]
• 1987 Ljubljana International Print Biennale; Grand Prize of Honor Award^[4]
• 1990 Japanese Prints of 20th Century, Reformist and Tradition" (Cincinnati Art Museum)
• 1993 Yamaguchi Gen Memorial Award
• 1996 Contemporary Art from the Museum Collection (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo)
• 1998 Photo Image: printmaking 60s to 90s (The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• 2002 The Unfinished Century: Legacies of 20th Century Art (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
• “Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary works on Papers”, Achenbach Foundation, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA.
• 2003 CAMK Grand Opening Commemorative Exhibition, Vol.3”, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto - CAMK, Kumamoto.
• MOT Annual : Days (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)
• Awarded with the Medal with Purple Ribbon from Japanese Government^[22]
• 2004 "Days in a Life", The Art of Tetsuya Noda, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco^[23]
• 2005 "Print World of Tetsuya Noda" (Uki Municipal Shiranuhi Museum of Art, Kumamoto)
• 2006 Contemporary Prints, Transformation of Photographic Image (The National Museum of Modern Art,Tokyo)
• 2006 Tetsuya Noda: Diary, Center for Contemporary Graphic Art ^[24]
• 2007 [http://www.geidai.ac.jp/museum/exhibit/2006/noda/noda_press.pdf TetsuyaNODA-Diary (Tokyo University of the Arts, University Museum)
• 2008 Portrait of Asia and Europe (The National Museum of Art, Osaka)
• 2009 Japanese contemporary printing exhibition 20th century to 21st century (Zhejiang Museum Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China)
• 2012 Tetsuya Noda Exhibition (The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama)
• 2013 Print Works by Tetsuya Noda: from the Museum Collection, Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art^[25]
• 2014 Noda Tetsuya's 'Diary', British Museum ^[26]
• 2016 Diary of Tetsuya Noda: Steven Co Collection, Ayala Museum ^[27]

Works

Since 1968, Noda’s works have been inspired by themes of his own life. The motif is a comment on his daily life - his family, people he knows, his children’s growth and scenery along his way. He takes photographs of what he sees and likes, then develops and retouches them with pencil or brushes. His works are done using materials close at hand.^[28][29]

When asked about how he found his theme; “Diary as an opportunity”, He replied, “at the university I was not at all satisfied with the assignment of painting nudes, it did not seem the right way to express myself.” His independent thinking and determination were highly rewarded. “I started to use a mimeograph cutting machine for the photo images in addition to the woodblock printmaking techniques.” In 1968, four years after he graduated from the university, he received the International Grand Prize at the 6th Tokyo International Print Biennale; “for the audacious combination of photography with traditional woodblock print.^[30]

In the British Museum Magazine, Timothy Clark, the keeper of Japanese section wrote “ In nearly fifty years, Noda has created some 500 further works that continue his mesmerizing ‘Diary’ series, using the unique combination of color woodblock and photo-based silkscreen onto handmade Japanese paper that he has made his own. Personal snapshots are rigorously reworked to become subtle mementos of universal significance: ‘what’s in a life?’ we are constantly prompted to ask.”^[31][32]

Techniques

Noda’s techniques combine woodblock and mimeographed silkscreen printmaking methods based on traditional woodblock print making techniques that use water colors. As in the case of Ukiyo-e, printmaking a key-block is used to define the main image and is printed first, the colors are then applied with color blocks using registration marks. This is possible because the watercolors are transparent. Noda uses the photo-image in the place of the key-block. The mimeographed photo images are applied in the last stage after having printed the colored areas with woodblocks.^[30][28]

Evaluation

Daniel Bell talking about the originality of Noda's prints says, "Noda's distinctiveness lies in three things: the remarkably consistent subject matter of his work, the structure and configurations of his compositions, and the novel techniques, consciously derived from Ukiyo-e, as the means of realizing his intentions."^[33][34]

The curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Robert Flynn Johnson wrote, “it is Tetsuya Noda who stands as the most original, innovative, and thought-provoking Japanese printmaker of his era".^[35]

Lawrence Smith, formerly Keeper of Japanese Antiquities at The British Museum wrote, "He is a master in at least four artistic genres , all of them closely related to painting. If considered as a printmaker, no Japanese can remotely equal his range of subject… Noda is unquestionably the greatest Japanese printmaker alive. But if considered as a creator of work very close to painting, one has also to ask what living Japanese could be considered his equal… but in my view not one of them can rival his remarkable range of subjects and emotions".^[36]

Steven Co, art collector wrote, "Tetsuya Noda’s Diary Series is a visual map of temporal, personal, experiential, and lyrical moments. Noda strives to preserve memory with the objectivity of his camera, but then disrupts the resulting photograph with the subjectivity of his pencils and brushes before committing the memory to a print. As if to ensure that a memory is engraved into his mind, he would repeatedly retreat to that memory with rigor and vigor by personally pulling each print by hand. The result and effect are quiet and understated accounts of memories revisited, reassessed, and repeatedly asserted through this labor-intensive process. Mr. Noda’s works are as much about the process of making them as the pleasingly introspective and sensitive result of a single work or his whole body of works".^[37]

References

External links

• British Museum
• Days in a Life: The Art of Tetsuya Noda by Robert Flynn Johnson
• The list of ”The Unfinished Century：Legacies of 20th Century Art”