Simultaneously a master of traditional Japanese lacquerwork and a trailblazer of the French Art Deco movement, Katsu Hamanaka left a unique mark on the Parisian art scene in the interwar period. Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Hamanaka began his career as a painter and sculptor, moving to Paris with his wife in 1924 to engage his interest in Western art. Over the next sixteen years, Hamanaka would join the small group of Parisian lacquerers leading the European decorative arts scene. From his workshop amongst the vibrant artistic community of La Cité Falguière, near Montparnasse, Hamanaka designed strikingly modern and meticulously hand-crafted furniture and objects d’art. The present three-panelled lacquer screen bears witness to this story of artistic exchange during the high point of the Art Deco movement in France.
During the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which taste was marked by Hollywood glamour, material splendour and one-of-a-kind luxury, Hamanaka's success as an émigré artist in Paris had much to do with his mastery of the traditional art of Japanese lacquer. As exemplified in the present screen, with its lustrous sheen and brilliant dynamism of form, Hamanaka was distinctive amongst the Parisian Art Deco designers for his ability to integrate a fashionable abstract aesthetic with an unwavering commitment to artisanal methods. Despite this, Hamanaka left Japan with no knowledge of lacquer, spending his first years in Paris specialising in the decoration of objects and furnishings with shagreen, ivory and precious woods. The turning point was his late 1920s encounter with Seizô Sugawara, a master lacquerer from Johili, north Japan, introduced to Hamanaka by Japanese painter and fellow Cité Falguière resident, Tsuguharu Foujita. As seen in an example of his work featuring as lot 38 in the present sale, Sugawara was a pioneer of the technique of natural lacquer in France. Unlike imitation lacquer varnish, natural lacquering was a lengthy, highly skilled process involving weeks of work and imported Japanese raw materials, such as resin from the Rhus vernicifera tree. Teaching the art of natural lacquer to promising young Parisian designers Eileen Gray, Jean Dunand, and Hamanaka himself, Sugawara laid the foundations for lacquer's rise to the forefront of the European Art Deco movement.
In the 1930s, Hamanaka stood out as Sugawara's most dedicated pupil, approaching the art of lacquer with a level of authenticity unmatched by his contemporaries. With its fineness of texture and surface alike, the present screen, dating to 1931, provides a terminus ad quem for Hamanaka's mastery of the technique. The screen's lacquered wood base, built up using the age-old layering method, evidences Hamanaka's use of artisanal tools and technical manuals he had imported from Japan. The artist's manipulation of Japanese raw materials, subtly evoked in the relief detail of leaves in the gilded surface of the present screen, conjures up a 1933 L'Intransigeant journalist's description of ''Hamanaka the lacquerer in his studio, full of fragrant and warm mist… everywhere, little jars for the gum paste and the trialling of different mixtures''. In its lustrous finish, the screen's applied gold leaf surface resembles the inrō objects and East Asian lacquers sought out by the artist in the museums of Paris, whilst its clean geometry, a stark departure from the intricate pictorial representations on traditional lacquer screens, places it firmly within the modish design context of 1930s Europe.
Hamanaka enjoyed a period of sustained success in the 1930s, gathering his own team of skilled under workers and collaborating with major designers such as Jules Leleu and Emile Jacques Ruhlmann. With the craze for lacquer coming to a halt over the war, however, Hamanaka's work, along with Sugawara's legacy, suffered neglect. Returning to Japan over the war, Hamanaka would not come back to Paris until 1952, by which time he found his studio and remaining pieces in ruins. The present screen is a rare testament to this brief yet prosperous period of artistic dialogue between the ancient Japanese and modernist French traditions.
