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ARTSETC.

Exhibit examines complexity of Japanese ukiyo-e

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by Jason Lester
Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Competition & Collaboration: Japanese Prints and the Utagawa School is the massive new exhibit running through Jan. 6 in the Chazen Museum of Art, displaying Japanese woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, that flourished in the "floating world" culture of Edo-period Japan. The exhibit is comprised of the University of Wisconsin's own Van Vleck collection, reputed to be the eighth largest collection of ukiyo-e prints in the United States, and it centers on prints by artists in the Utagawa School, a vast coterie associated with hundreds of artists who lived almost two centuries ago.

Utagawa artists are responsible for more than half of all ukiyo-e prints, which are still extant, and they are a testament to both the school's enduring popularity as well as its size and copious output. Consequently, the history of aesthetic and technical evolution in the Utagawa School is also the history of ukiyo-e as a whole, with the exhibit encompassing a wide range of genres and styles. From the warrior prints of Kuniyoshi to the famous landscapes of Hiroshige, almost every style of ukiyo-e print is represented, even sneaking in a little shunga — explicit, anonymous pornographic prints usually swept under the rug in academic exhibitions — for good measure.

The scope of the exhibit seems to have necessitated splitting the exhibit into six "sections," each print separated into its own group and period and subtly color-coded by its accompanying, invaluably informative text. The resulting effect is a chronological narrative of the Utagawa School as museum visitors are led counterclockwise around the two large gallery rooms.

The exhibit begins with Utagawa Toyoharu, the artist who founded the Utagawa School in the second half of the 18th century. His prints, depicting festivals and Kabuki theatre performances from a one-point perspective "floating" over its subject, laid the foundation for a uniquely ukiyo-e style of landscape prints. Next comes Toyohiro and Toyokuni, who both excelled in the genres of actor prints and "beautiful women," or bijin-ga. Toyokuni's "A View of Cherry Blossoms at the New Yoshiwara," a stunning five-sheet print, is exemplary of this style. Displaying a procession of courtesans — high-class prostitutes of Edo's Yoshiwara pleasure quarters — dressed in colorful, intricately designed kimonos passing under cherry trees in bloom, the print's focus is on graceful refinement, the cherry blossoms colored a delicate pink and embossed onto the paper itself.

Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada are all substantially represented in the exhibit — to no surprise, given that each achieved immense fame in the 19th century for their respective talents at designing prints of landscapes, warriors and actors.  Of particular note is Kunisada's "The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro VII in a Shibaraku Role," a striking depiction of the celebrated "rough"-style actor of the Kabuki stage. The print showcases a nervous intensity created in the sharp, angular lines of the actor's solid-red clothing as he crosses his eyes and freezes in an exaggerated pose.

Hiroshige's landscapes are the ukiyo-e prints with perhaps the widest fame among the general populace, and the exhibit seems to conscientiously buck this characterization by presenting much of Hiroshige's lesser-known work, from illustrations of historical events to many close-up depictions of courtesans. Despite these attempts, however, it is nonetheless his landscapes that stand out the most in the exhibit. One landscape is his vertical diptych "Snowy Gorge at Fuji River," which presents a bird's-eye view of jutting, snowy peaks while two small boats traverse the precarious, deep-blue water below. Another, "Nihon Bridge and Edo Bridge," from the mid-19th century, is designed from the curious first-person perspective of someone standing on the Nihon Bridge, leaning over the railing and peering down into the harbor below. Perhaps the most stunning, however, is "Taira no Kiyomori Haunted by Snow Specters," which shows the villain of Japan's warrior epic "The Tales of the Heike," looking out from his Edo-style veranda at a snowy garden, seeing the ghosts of those he had murdered in the hallucinatory and disturbingly shaped piles of snow. The result is a brilliant, Dalí-like scene of human subjectivity twisting the shape of the traditional landscape.

The exhibit and ukiyo-e itself ends in the Meiji period of 19th-century Japan, where westernization and technological advances in photography and lithography led to quicker, more efficient means of producing imagery for mass consumption, eventually leading to the demise of ukiyo-e's labor-intensive prints. In this period, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was one of the last stylistic holdouts to traditional woodblock techniques and subject matter, as seen in "Watanabe no Tsuna Cutting off the Demon's Arm at Rashomon Gate," 1888. This pillar print of the warrior Tsuna, fighting a demon that was believed to have haunted the historic Rashomon Gate, exemplifies Yoshitoshi's beautiful treatment of violence through dynamic, dance-like movement and astonishingly vibrant color.


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