Approved by the Air Force

The hit of the Tokyo art season--what there is of it--is a Frenchman who has lived in Japan since he was four. His show, on display last week, had the imposing sponsorship of the U.S. Fifth Air Force. An exhibition of 67 wood-block prints (and 50 paintings) of Ukiyo-e ("mundane life") subjects, it was a blend of East and West.

Art and Japanese both came early to Paul Jacoulet, whose father was a French teacher in Japan. Says he: "Almost before I spoke, I was glad to have a pencil in my hand." Young Paul used to spend his weekly sen for color prints instead of candy. Now, sitting in a kimono on the floor of his western-style villa (six miles' train-ride from Tokyo), Jacoulet designs his own prints.

He has made only brief trips away from Japan--though he was once a copra planter on Saipan and has made 14 trips to the South Seas--but his works have traveled far. Among U.S. collectors: Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, Mrs. Joseph Clark Grew, Edward G. Robinson.

Like many Ukiyo-e artists, Jacoulet hires woodcarvers and printers to convert his ideas into prints. He thinks the prints should surpass the original designs.

Jacoulet's designs average 15 or 20 colors (he once made one with 320). To be transferred to paper, each color requires a separate block of wood; the colors (boiled with seaweed) are rubbed into it. His cherry-wood blocks come from the volcanic islands off the Izu peninsula.

He pulls about 200 prints of each subject before things go well enough to run off the 120 prints he will sell. The earlier ones he uses to paper the floor of his chicken house. He also destroys the wood blocks, so that they cannot be used a^ain. When he is not tending his chickens or designing prints, Jacoulet chases butterflies (he has 100,000 specimens).

Any Japanese connoisseur who saw the Army's exhibit last week would be quick to point out that Jacoulet is more of a craftsman than a draftsman. Compared with Utamaro and Hokusai, the old masters of print-making's great period (1600-1867), Jacoulet's designs have a long way to go. But he is reviving interest in a vanishing art, and for that, all Japanese patrons of prints could be grateful.

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