PRINTS BY PAUL JACOULET


	Prints numbered 15 Homme de Menado et Mangoustans, Celebes 1935, and 19 La Geisha Kiyoka, Tokyo 1935 Oban-tate-e are the earliest examples in the Richard Collection. The numbering of the prints is from the complete illustrated catalog by Richard Miles. 1982.The Prints of Paul Jacoulet. Robert G. Sawyers Publishing in association with the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, California. London: The Hillingdon Press. Literally ‘Man from Menado with Mangosteen, Celebes’ this portrait in Deco style (modern combinations of purples, oranges, silver,and mica tinting) highlights the beauty of this male of mixed descent. Menado’s population in the 1930’s comprised early Portuguese immigrants who had mixed with the local Indonesian peoples. This fellow wears a silver earring, indicative of his European antecedents. He wears a bandana and covers his shoulders in the same flower and leaf pattern whose origin seems European. Jacoulet was known, in his travels as a journalist and photographer to these islands shortly after Japanese occupation began, to drape his local subjects in garments and patterns he may have brought with him from Japan. The fabrics may not be indigenous to Indonesia. The subject’s face and skin tone make him seem like one of the Christians who inhabit Ambon, and East Timor today. His angular and somewhat European features are borrowed again in Jacoulet’s tribute to Manet’s infamous painting of 1863 called Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, his print number 53, also in the Richard Collection. While in Manet’s work, it is the lady who throws off her afternoon frock, in Jacoulet’s print, it is the fellow who sits calmly nude while the ‘so-called’ lady gazes down. As is the custom in the Japanese Kabuki theatre to use male actors in female roles, In print # 53, the gazing lady is really a man dressed in Portuguese style clothing.
	In print #19, the model for Kiyoka, a geisha from Tokyo, is, in fact, a Eurasian. What you see is not what you get. Jacoulet is obviously pushing the boundaries of convention. Kiyoka wears a largely geometric kimono in the pattern of the Genji-ko, or the geomantric signs associated with the incense game based on the chapter titles from The Tale of Genji. The sakura pattern of her obi is done in Deco recombinant colors of red, ochre, and green instead of a more usual pink, and her obijime, the Deco purple tied cord that keeps the obi in place is accented with silver at almost the exact center of the print, so that when the viewer walks by, the eye is drawn to that spot. In Print #15, the same effect is achieved through the use of silver on the man’s earring. Any movement on the part of the viewer will draw his eye to the man’s ear. Additionally, Kiyoha is a referential subject because she is holding in her hands Jacoulet’s first issued print from 1934, a year earlier, called ‘Young girl of Saipan and hibiscus.’ One might call this print ‘Lady in her prime with cherry blossoms wishing she were young with hibuscus. Models for both prints are strikingly Eurasian and indicate the depth to which Jacoulet felt he was a part of both European and Asian culture. He would continue to mix cultures in this way throughout his artistic career.