Kumi Korf

The very setting of a childhood home can become a determinant for an artist. Kumi Korf (Japanese, b. 1937) parents’ house faced west, providing daily access to the setting sun. But she recalls that singular day when the sky’s luminosity was relentlessly seductive. Korf responded by getting out a set of watercolors and starting to paint. The work intuitive, the instance seminal, she states without equivocation, “That was the moment when I took painting as part of my own life.”

That life was never confined to painting, as Korf initially pursued architectural studies in her native Tokyo. She then traveled to the United States to earn her MFA at Cornell University in printmaking in 1977. As a young artist coming to the States, Korf brought with her a special fascination for Western culture, common among the Japanese; she developed a predilection for the European modernists. At Cornell, under the tutelage of H. Peter Kahn, who was himself a student of Hans Hofmann’s, the impressionable Japanese artist welcomed the visual vernacular of the New York School.

As a newly minted printmaker, filled with the legacy of the European and American avant-garde, Korf segued into creating artist books, which were featured in exhibitions at the Center for Book Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1986. During a 1987 apprenticeship at the Dieu Donné Papermill in Brooklyn, Korf, already proficient in intaglio techniques, explored papermaking, converting kozo fiber, cloth, and pigmented linen pulp from a matrix into a medium, conjoined with the incised imagery. Thus, the artist schooled in Western modernism became enamored by the expressive capacities of paper, engaging with her Japanese heritage.

The reunion with her lineage was fully consummated in 2000 when Korf encountered the work of 17th-century calligrapher and craftsman Hon’ami Kōetsu at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When Korf entered his universe, she relates, “it was like a homecoming.” Korf did not renounce her European and American training; rather she merged it stylistically and technically with her Eastern roots, forging a newfound artistic path.
However, melded from a compilation of artistic influences and technical mastery, Korf’s artistic sensibilities remain rooted in her observation of the natural world. She relates: “The complexity and richness of interactions that we encounter in daily life, interlaced with the observation of nature’s delight and joy, fill me to the brim.”
Joyful saturation in nature characterizes Korf’s more recent work as well. Gently overlapping biomorphic forms shift between opaque and translucent. Her expansive palette presents corresponding colors that seldom clash. With sensitivity to surrounding scenery, Korf suggests plant life, seagrass, a plethora of natural phenomena in multilayered intaglio plates. The concise calligraphic glyphs of Hon’ami Kōetsu are always present.
The margins in Korf’s intaglios are emphatic, emanating from her investigation of paper. In 1989, after repeated unsuccessful attempts to print on chine collé, she made a test run, using inexpensive Japanese paper. Korf happily discovered that the paper, Akatosashi, with its natural tone and slight sheen, suited her vision well. She avoided mounting the Akatosashi on European paper like traditional chine collé. It became the primary printing support. The sheets allowed for large margins, either side to side or top to bottom, which she has maintained now for 30 years. “Occasionally, I tried to reconsider, but each time,” she recalls, “I came back to the same feeling and the same solution. My feelings are the extra paper margin gives me expansions. Maybe unknown spaces . . . with very quiet resonance.”

The anomaly of the margins is intrinsic to the impact of The Bough and Cradle Fall, Korf’s publication print for the Print Club of Cleveland. The outsized lower margin accentuates the verticality of the composition. The amorphic figure in saturated autumnal red, released from a tenuous tether in the print’s upper region, gently tumbles from the soft blue field, pulled downward through a faintly yellow ground by a thin, intertwining bloodred line. The large lower margin, with the subtle tonality of the paper, beckons. Korf transforms the lyrics of the nursery rhyme, the source of the title, from somber to gestational. The delicate brushstroke of the watercolorist resounds in The Bough and Cradle Fall. Recall the young girl in her parents’ Tokyo home, getting out her watercolor set, inspired by a singular sunset, catalyzing the life of an artist, filled to the brim with joy.

Widely exhibited throughout her impressive career, Korf received in 2023 the accolade of a solo show at the Center for Book Arts in New York, entitled Kumi Korf: A World of Her Own. The center has honored her for her singular achievements in and commitment to furthering book arts. Korf’s works are in numerous prestigious collections, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Tate Library, to mention only a few.

-Darlene G. Michitsch

The Bough and Cradle Fall, the Print Club of Cleveland publication print no. 101 for 2023. Intaglio, sugar lift, aquatint, stencils, and inked threads on Akatosashi paper; image: 31.75 x 9.75 in.; sheet: 37 x 9.75