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Rating: 
Summary: Please, stand in awe of this master.
Review: This is a beautifully presented and totally unpretentious book, a relatively undiscovered treasure about a relatively undiscovered treasure.It is hard to do justice to the astounding body of work which the Japanese woodblock printmaker Shiko Munakata created between 1931 and 1975 (the year of his death at the age of 73). The Woodblock and the Artist' makes an appropriate, captivating and sympathetic effort in this direction. Books are books after all, made to fit on a shelf, and it has to be said that Munakata's work is not shelf-scale. Munakata was a man cast in a Herculean mould - whilst his work is often tender and sensuous, and frequently humorous, it is big in size, full of energy and strong in power. Munakata was no miniaturist, almost the opposite: some of his huge woodcuts are more than ten feet wide and five feet high, bursting with energy across every square inch and with a mastery of all which can be done with black and white. But who is to say that Munakata is a master or that he is not? The question of mastery is, as Turner said about Art itself, 'a rummy thing'. It is all about pedestals and position in history. Let Munakata have the pedestal which he deserves, and which this book, 'The Woodblock and the Artist' will create for him in such an appropriate and elegant way.
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