What the paper printed

The museum’s record of where these stencils came from reads, in full: Helen Snyder; 1976: acquired by Museum. Nothing comes before her: no dealer, no sale, no earlier owner.¹ Every object in accession lot 1976-103 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, carries the same credit line, Gift of Helen Snyder. There are two hundred and ninety of them, nearly all of them katagami, the paper stencils Japanese dyers used to print patterns on cloth.² In 1979 the museum counted “over 400 kata-gami” in its collection. Hers were about seven in every ten.³

It was the only gift she made the museum. Its record of her as a person has a name, a count of two hundred and ninety objects, and empty fields for a biography, for dates, for a country.⁴ The Smithsonian’s annual report for 1977 lists her among the donors of works of art as Miss Helen Snyder. Twenty-seven pages further on, the same volume lists a Mrs. Helen Snyder who gave another Smithsonian museum “1 woman’s apron, after 1875, silk.” Nothing we found connects the two women except the name.⁵

The one place where more is likely to survive is the museum’s accession file for the lot: the deed of gift, an address, perhaps a letter. It is not online, and we have not seen it.

Three that are not Japanese

Three sheets in the lot are French. The museum records them as pochoir prints, “Plate 12 from Relais,” “Plate 14” and “Plate 15,” and names no maker. A portfolio with that title exists: Relais, fifteen plates of decorative designs by Édouard Bénédictus, coloured by Jean Saudé and published in Paris in 1930. Going by the title and the plate numbers, her three sheets come from it. The attribution is ours, not the museum’s.⁶

Pochoir is a stencil process too: the colour is brushed through cut sheets, one for each tone. It would be too much to call that a collecting plan. It is the closest thing in the record to a thought of hers.

A tool made of paper

A katagami starts as sheets of mulberry paper brushed with fermented persimmon juice and laid two to four deep, the grain of each turned against the next, “as in plywood,” in the words of the museum’s 1979 catalogue.⁷ The centre of the trade was Suzuka, near the Bay of Ise, in the villages of Shiroko and Jike. There was no dyeing industry there: the stencils went to the dye-works of Kyoto and Edo.⁸

The finer the cut, the weaker the sheet. Long thin stripes, or leaves that hang from nothing, would drop out of the paper. So the stencil was split between its layers, a net of fine silk threads was laid inside, and the halves were glued back together. The practice is called itoire, “putting in thread.”⁹ Of the eighty-two stencils from her gift that the museum has published with an image, seventy-six name silk threads in their list of materials; in the next largest group in the collection, it is eight of forty-four. These are counts of what the museum wrote, not of what the paper holds.¹⁰ The gap is large all the same. Whoever chose these stencils, she or someone before her, chose the ones that need holding together.

The cloth

The dyer stretched the cloth on a long board, laid the stencil on it and pressed a paste of rice through the openings with a spatula, then lifted the stencil and set it down again further along. Once the whole length was pasted, the cloth was dyed, very often in indigo, and the paste washed out. “The pattern emerges in white against a colored ground.”¹¹ The stencil and the cloth are opposites: what is cut away from the paper is white on the cloth, and what is left of the paper becomes the colour.

Very little of the cloth these stencils printed has survived with them. So for twelve of hers the book rebuilds one impression of each from the museum’s photograph. Every opening becomes undyed cotton, every part of the paper becomes indigo, and the silk threads are taken out, since the paste flowed around them. Nothing is drawn by hand. These are reconstructions, not historical textiles: the real cloth may have been another colour.¹² Two of the twelve, Bird Among the Peonies and Grasses and Cranes, the museum believes were made to be looked at, and may never have printed anything.¹³

The book

Her name is on every one of them shows each of the twelve twice: on one page the stencil as it is kept today, with the museum’s record; on the facing page the cloth it would have made. Where the museum’s measurements allow it, details are printed at actual size, with a ruler in millimetres. There is an essay on the gift, one on the craft of Ise katagami, and at the end every stencil from her gift that the museum has published with an image, eighty-two in all.

It also ends where we came in. Métrica prints shirts by screen, and a screen is a stencil held together by thread from edge to edge. Looking for the next katagami to print, we read the museum’s credit lines and found the same name under most of them. The book prints her stencils with their titles, dates and numbers, and with her name, because it is on the object.