Last November Clifton Karhu, Japan's most famous foreign resident artist, turned 77 years of age, and his dealer, Norman Tolman, has published this extremely handsome "tribute" to the printmaker and his work.
Karhu began working in Japan in 1963 and has now created some 1,500 prints. Mostly these have been scenes in and around Kyoto and Kanazawa. His views of the old capital have in several senses defined the ways in which we now see it.
Yet when Michiaki Kawakita, then director of the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, saw his first Karhu print, he said it was "certainly not the Kyoto that the Japanese see." Later, however, he came to understand what Karhu was doing.
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