MASTERWORKS OF UKIYO-E

July 28, 1996 - February 16, 1997

From the inception of the Edo period (1603-1868) at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate stratified Japanese society into four distinct classes: the samurai at the highest level, followed by farmers, artisans, and finally merchants -- who were deemed less important in the Neo-Confucian hierarchy because they did not produce anything but instead lived "parasitically" off the fruit of other people's labor. By the eighteenth century, this theoretical ordering of society no longer corresponded with economic reality, since the merchants had come to control a considerable proportion of the nation's wealth. Denied access to political power, these merchants spent their money lavishly on extravagant frivolity. The impetuous young culture that bloomed in the urban centers of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto became a world unto itself and was dubbed Ukiyo - the "Floating World." The word Ukiyo - which alluded to the term for the "Sorrowful World" of death and rebirth from which Buddhists sought release - was rewritten with the character "floating" (also pronounced uki) instead of "sorrowful" and used with an ironic connotation to aptly characterize this ever-changing world of fashion and entertainment.

Organized by Anne Rose Kitagawa, assistant curator for Japanese art, Masterworks of Ukiyo-e explores a distinct moment in the history of Ukiyo-e (Pictures of the Floating World) primarily through the printed works of two important artists: Toshusai Sharaku (active 1794-95) and Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806). Both Sharaku and Utamaro were active in the city of Edo at the end of the eighteenth century and each strongly influenced successive generations of Japanese artists in their respective genres of Kabuki-actor portraiture and the depiction of beautiful women. Because of this, their period of activity is regarded by many as the golden age of the Japanese woodblock print-making tradition. Indeed, since Ukiyo culture centered on the microcosm of the Pleasure District, Sharaku and Utamaro's works served to popularize the heroes and heroines on whom the culture thrived.

Toshusai Sharaku is perhaps the single most enigmatic figure in the history of Japanese art. He was active for only ten months during 1794 and 1795, and yet single-handedly transformed the visual language of the period with his incisive, psychologically probing depictions of Kabuki actors. Produced exclusively by Edo's foremost print publisher, Tsutaya Juzaburo (1750-97), Sharaku was amazingly prolific during his brief period of activity and then disappeared from the scene as suddenly as he had appeared. His oeuvre exhibits a surprising degree of development, his style changed as much in ten months as the work of many other artists might change over the course of many years.

During his first "period" (the Fifth Month of 1794) Sharaku produced the work for which he is most famous, about thirty oban bust portraits of Kabuki actors (exemplified by the majority of the prints in this exhibition). During the Seventh and Eighth Months of the same year, he produced almost fifty oban and smaller sized full-length actor portraits. The works of both of these periods are characterized by extreme facial exaggeration and compositional and coloristic brilliance. During his third and final period Sharaku produced almost ninety prints of various sizes -- images that lack the startling genius of his earlier output but make clear the stylistic prototypes from which he drew inspiration (the works of Katsukawa Shunsho [1726-92] and his followers).

Ironically, the very characteristics which brought Sharaku the acclaim of the Western audience who came to lionize him may have been his undoing. The other, more popular Ukiyo-e artists of Sharaku's day practiced their art with an eye towards refinement, a softening aesthetic which no-doubt curbed the tendency toward unflattering representation. Sharaku apparently did not have this capacity, and thus his images have an unbridled, raw quality much admired in the twentieth century but likely shocking to his contemporaries -- a factor that may have contributed to his eventual stylistic change and perhaps even his sudden disappearance.

Over the years, there have been numerous theories put forward to explain the identity of this mysterious artist, none of them completely convincing. Sharaku has been associated with a No actor in the service of the Lord of Awa, a haiku poet, at least two separate minor Osaka-based Kabuki artists, the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo himself, a woman, and a wide variety of other famous Ukiyo-e and non-Ukiyo-e artists. Unless future generations of art historians discover long-lost documentary records, it is unlikely that the world will ever know the true identity of Toshusai Sharaku. Nonetheless, the dynamism of his vision and the unflinching attention he lavished on even the most unflattering details of an actor's appearance guarantee this baffling artist a place in the annals of great portraiture, one whose work was -- lamentably -- produced during a brief, if brilliant, ten-month career.

Unlike the enigmatic Sharaku, Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806) was undoubtedly one of the most celebrated Ukiyo-e artist of his day. Characterized by an exquisite sensuousness, his depictions of the courtesans of the Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarter were indebted to the svelte elegance of the women portrayed by Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815), but informed further by his own sympathetic observation of various subtle psychological states.

Taught first by the Kano-trained artist Toriyama Sekien (1712-88), Utamaro was taken in as a young artist by the important publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo, who helped to support him, honed and developed his art, and presented the promising young print designer to the Edo artistic circle in the mid 1770s. He first achieved prominence in the field of book illustration, with deluxe editions such as the "Mushi Erami" (pages of which will be displayed in the exhibition), and later with masterfully composed bust-portraits of women. Utamaro appears to have spent a good deal of time in the brothel district, and did portraits of many of the reigning beauties of the day. He imbued his depictions with a sense of lively animation and an overt sexuality quite unlike any in the images of his predecessors, and utilized the woodblock medium to its utmost, taking obvious pleasure in the graphic possibilities of the complex multiple-woodblock printing technique and such subtleties as "blind printing" (printing a pigmentless block in order to acheive a three-dimensional embossing effect).

During the period of Utamaro's activity, the Tokugawa Shogunate tried repeatedly to censure Ukiyo-e artists and their merchant patrons by enacting strict sumptuary laws designed to curb their consumption of luxury items such as silk, textiles decorated using certain costly techniques, and precious metals. However, the more the government sought to enforce their reforms, the more the irrepressible Edo merchants came to resent their persecutors, and the more cleverly they devised means of flouting the regulations. Utamaro's publisher Tsutaya was prosecuted in 1791 for publishing a series of books and half of his estate was confiscated by the government. He bounced back by publishing his most lavish and daring production to date, a series of Utamaro's okubi-e (bust portraits) of famous beauties depicted against a gorgeously executed background of scattered mica dust. In 1804, Utamaro himself was imprisoned for one day and kept in chains for an additional fifty for the transgression of twice depicting the important late-sixteenth-century historical figure, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, despite stringent laws prohibiting such representations (Hideyoshi was viewed with great sympathy by the merchant-class Edoites as having been unfairly deposed by his eventual successors - the founders of the Tokugawa Shogunate). Nonetheless, Utamaro survived his punishment and continued to produce popular imagery for his remaining years.

This exhibition will show a variety of Utamaro's woodblock prints in a number of different categories. The first rotation (July 20-September 15, 1996) will explore a few of his numerous witty parody pictures and his elegant depictions of lovers. The second (September 17-November 10, 1996) will showcase Utamaro's inventive triptych designs as well as his beloved images of women and children. The final rotation (November 13, 1996-January 12, 1997) will focus on his psychologically nuanced okubi-e portraits of women and two large and impressive multiple-block compositions.

Masterworks of Ukiyo-e will be enhanced by a selection of related paintings, textiles, and decorative objects, giving a sense of the aesthetic milieu of this vibrant and multi-faceted period.