The Edo Period - An Impression of Japanese Art History
Sounds pretty majestic as a title. An impression. Has that cryptic double meaning of impression as knowledge and the western art movement known as Impressionism. My introduction to the wood block prints produced in Edo during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century when Japan was largely cut off from the West has been through an exhibition and souvenir picture book I picked up in the museum store. The book presents the basics of this prolific period of Japanese middle class art. It’s described as a reflection of life in the pleasure districts in Edo during this time of isolation from the rest of the world.
The book is entitled simply Japanese Prints. The author Gabriele Fahr-Becker makes a definitive statement in the title but I hardly think that this is the definitive treatise on Japanese prints. It is a wonderful introduction the subject but admittedly the depth of research sparse. I’ve read too much history and was expecting a real examination of the subject and instead I receive an examination of the art. Duh, that’s what the book is. GFB doesn’t spend much time in the world that produced this magnificent body of work and concentrates on the dissection of the emotional response each of these works elicits. I’m not really used to this type presentation. You might flip through a coffee table book but it’s rare that one sits and reads the verbiage cover to cover. From attempting to read the volume cover to cover, I’m gaining a sense of why this is the case. History-lite; a ten minute PowerPoint presentation on the history then a 90 minute slide show on the art accompanied by descriptive narration. The book itself is printed on high quality heavy paper with glossy finish and quality color. It was worth the investment. I am learning something of the history despite my misgivings. As I work through the slides I began to understand something of the culture that illuminated these prints. Unfortunately, I find the narration a little arrogant at times. The cultural aristocracy in this country. Feign tolerance of the ignorance in the present middle class in understanding the world of another middle class that existed two hundred years ago on the other side of the planet. I don’t think the author understands either group of people; he’s focusing his critique through the lens of western art critic pretensions. It’s not the blatant distortions of the early twentieth century; he appears to lead his descriptions towards the familiar and steers the reader away from the truly alien nature of the more subtle aspects of these works.
Where was this place? Edo, Japan, circa 1750-1850. The era of the samurai warrior. It brings to mind Europe’s medieval period. Knights and kings and battles and maidens and rape and pillage and burn. Or perhaps America’s wild,wild west. Black hats and white hats, good guys and bad. A duel on a dusty road in the fading light of the day. Nope, this wasn’t that Japan. There were samurai alright but the duels were as real as the gunfights in the old west. This was more like San Francisco during its boom days. There was a strong middle class, an established government with concrete institutions and the samurai wore swords the way the city elders in San Francisco wore guns. It was a fashion statement and God help the innocent if the wearer was actually required to use the weapon. Nineteenth Century California, Eighteenth Century Edo Japan? Yea, I suppose it might be a reasonable comparison. A whole lot of posturing and very little in the way of substance. It looks to have been a great party though. Edo was more refined than gold rush California and a hell of a lot cleaner, but the carefree attitudes and the conveyance of leisure are prominent through out the prints. Many of the prints reproduced in the book are considered national treasures in Japan. The nostalgia of a time and a place lost in history. The woodblock print. Quite the medium of communication.
The work itself does not have that lifelike quality evolving in the greats of western classical art. The discipline of the Edo period woodblock print is closer to the dance hall posters of Toulouse Lautrec. There was another artist of the time that also made a reputation in this medium. I’ve got a cheap Wal-Mart reproduction hanging above the toilet. This is closest to what these Japanese artists were producing. They were not commissions for aristocrats and museums. These were commissions for local theaters and public consumption. There existed a middle class that had the disposable income and freedom of both expression and movement that gave rise for the need of public entertainment districts. So much comes to mind in our own culture. The theater district, the restaurant district, the live entertainment district, the red light district. Then there is the mythical sophistication of Japanese culture. It is a long standing tradition that the Japanese have a sophistication and knowledge of all things that allow them a superiority in bearing and negotiations that always intimidates their foe. That illusion is, or should be by now, shattered, shredded and utterly trashed. These are just people, sheltered by their island, allowed to homogenize and sterilize their culture to a shade that allows almost no sense to be made from any outside observer. Everyone is an alien in Japan. Or so it’s said. For me, the emotional response from these prints is one of familiarity. These are scenes and portraits of people acting like people. Working hard in the day and pursuing the carnal pleasures at night. Artists living amongst these people sketched and painted the street scenes maybe to stay in form during the time absent of the commercial art commissions. And then there were the picture books of the street scenes, entertainers, actors and prostitutes. The author alludes to the pornographic nature of some of these portraits, but I certainly see it. It’s not a western style, although I’m sure that some of the wood blocks produced were very explicit in their subject, those presented in the book were only titillating. I’m trying to super-impose these images on the culture and I come away with a Maxim magazine. Poetry, music, art and theater. Presented by very attractive people. These were the subjects contained in these prints. Very basic, very middle-class. The drawings are simple and convey a cartoon quality with them. Surprisingly, the author tries to describe these … these caricatures in terms familiar to the classics of the western renaissance. “The lines, the form, the acute depiction.” Come on. These prints evoke a real familiar response. It is art that is accessible to the masses. It is not passed down from on high to the illiterate mob to covet and hold in awe. These are prints that people hung up in their den or kitchen or entry and were gossiped about:
“Oh, you have the new print of Umtidy Scratch actor in the new production of Epic Love Tragedy”
“Yes, yes. My (husband, boyfriend, father, brother, none of the above) took me to the theater last week. Truly magical, it was, it was.”
Sharaku: Two Actors
I don’t know if the married women cavorted in the entertainment district with the same freedom as the men or whether they needed a chaperone, but it appears that there were family friendly sections of the pleasure quarter. It also appears that the married women of the period, like most of human history, exercised some degree of autonomy in spite of the thick veneer of paternalism. I’m sure that not all life in sealed Japan was good, but it is certainly the case that these were good times for many.
There are several main streams of this art form represented by a variety of artists. There are several schools and the author lightly touches off on the evolution of the various schools before he reaches what can be regarded as an interesting story. There was one artist that traveled into Edo one day, produced an incredible body of work in about a years time, then vanished into thin air after. Nobody knows anything about the guy; where he came from, where he went. Total mystery. Through out the book, the author has been careful to mention interesting facts about several of the artists and actors, some changed careers, some died, others had students that went on to bring the style and technique of wood block prints further along. The artist that the author literally gushes over is of the name Sharaku. Perhaps it’s the sophistication of the print or something radical in the style of portraiture, but I’m not seeing the genius in his work. The pieces presented for review in the book were all theater advertisements and actor head shots in costume. The story is very much that of a temp commercial artist. Sharaku was a talented artist that was able to produce a quantity of high quality work in a short period of time. Perhaps the revolution in appearance stems from the fact that instead of having a special insight into the soul of the character, this Sharaku simply portrayed what he saw. There was nothing unique what he did, at least from his own point of view, he collected his wages and left town. This description is juxtaposition against the image of the suffering Japanese woodblock print artist. You know, an Asian Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear in some vain effort to placate the voices in his head. My image is that of a robust market atmosphere with a small group of men gathered around the tools needed to make the prints they needed to sell to feed their respective families, prodding the master of the art that was at the heart of their product. Check that, prodding the artist the owner of the shop had dug up to convince the theater owners that his print shop was the one he needed to use to advertise his new show. The story told in the book includes all the information about the show the theater, the date, the actors, their popularity, the publisher of the prints, but there is almost no information about the artist, Sharaku. Odd it would seem to me. Like a lord moving amongst the commoners, indulging in a pass time meant for less than his station of in-the-manor-born. Great story, better fairy tale. I like the idea of a temp. The anti-Warhol, a man who isn’t debasing his great artistic passions by taking a job designing an ad campaign. Sharaku didn’t have any artistic passions, this was a job. Suffering artist pay is shit.
The other artists settled down and appeared to have founded schools from which they derived an income teaching the children of the affluent what it is to be an artist. Is this true, absolutely not, it is a complete fabrication. I am a working man and have never been able to understand what all the great artists and composers did for a living? There are some beautiful portraits and posters that all carry the same style except for one, Hokusai and his style of presentation that seems to have changed things. His work includes the famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji that has the iconic Back of a Wave on the Open Sea off Kanagawa included. This is the print of the large blue wave as it rears to crash down on some very tiny fishing vessels. There is quite a bit of space in the book devoted to his work and the work that seemed to emulate the style here. The bright colors, the clear lines, the cartoonesque quality that is neither humorous or naïve. There is also the leakage of techniques and methods from the west. But in their isolation and probably in their pride, the Japanese woodblock artist and publisher put an interesting flavor to the art form that stills reverberates through the magna and anime being produced today. The element that I see clearly lacking in the authors presentation is the cursory notice he give to the production team that actually produced these works. We are looking at the print and not the original art that was used to produce the woodblock. The colors and the detail are due to advances in technical aspects of production not artistic.
Hokusai: Back of a Wave
It is this artist and the work that his contemporaries produced that the content of the book take on the landscape. There is a chronology to the book and these artists were developing style post 1830. The author walks away from the portraits and moves into the landscapes that were produced until the late 1850’s as the book closes. This last portion of the book reproduces many of the prints and styles that are familiar in the west. It is these prints that seem to move me the most. The format that these artists take on is that of views of something. 56 Famous Places in Edo. Stuff like that. Again the author only bounces off the economic and social growth in and around Edo and the change in demand of the market. He concentrates on the art and ends the tour through the “Edo Period” with the death of Hiroshige in 1857. I guess it became fashionable to be decadent, which of course bleached all the decadence out of the pleasure quarter. Maybe it was the end of the shogunate. Maybe it was the nineteenth century equivalent of the western multi-national corporation buying out local businesses to gain market access and consolidate market share, standardizing product thereby wringing the soul out of it, and increasing distribution area. Who knows? The author appears to be the member of the mob encharged with enshrining and holding in awe those things decried great works of art. Or maybe he’s a temp writing a book around a collection of old magazine pictures set up in a big, imposing museum.
Hiroshige: The Fuji River on the Tokaido
I mentioned at several times that the emotion that these prints evoked in me was familiarity. Familiarity not only of place and action, but also of style. It is clear to any anime fan that the styles developed in these prints are the same being used today. I have been a fan of the underground world of graphic novels and anime since it was underground. I wasn’t an obsessed soul that was in pursuit of the most edgy stuff I could find. I was looking for something fresh and I did find it in the pages of magazines like Heavy Metal and artists like Mobius. These prints do ring a note of familiarity in me. A world we all dream of visiting. A floating world.
The book is entitled simply Japanese Prints. The author Gabriele Fahr-Becker makes a definitive statement in the title but I hardly think that this is the definitive treatise on Japanese prints. It is a wonderful introduction the subject but admittedly the depth of research sparse. I’ve read too much history and was expecting a real examination of the subject and instead I receive an examination of the art. Duh, that’s what the book is. GFB doesn’t spend much time in the world that produced this magnificent body of work and concentrates on the dissection of the emotional response each of these works elicits. I’m not really used to this type presentation. You might flip through a coffee table book but it’s rare that one sits and reads the verbiage cover to cover. From attempting to read the volume cover to cover, I’m gaining a sense of why this is the case. History-lite; a ten minute PowerPoint presentation on the history then a 90 minute slide show on the art accompanied by descriptive narration. The book itself is printed on high quality heavy paper with glossy finish and quality color. It was worth the investment. I am learning something of the history despite my misgivings. As I work through the slides I began to understand something of the culture that illuminated these prints. Unfortunately, I find the narration a little arrogant at times. The cultural aristocracy in this country. Feign tolerance of the ignorance in the present middle class in understanding the world of another middle class that existed two hundred years ago on the other side of the planet. I don’t think the author understands either group of people; he’s focusing his critique through the lens of western art critic pretensions. It’s not the blatant distortions of the early twentieth century; he appears to lead his descriptions towards the familiar and steers the reader away from the truly alien nature of the more subtle aspects of these works.
Where was this place? Edo, Japan, circa 1750-1850. The era of the samurai warrior. It brings to mind Europe’s medieval period. Knights and kings and battles and maidens and rape and pillage and burn. Or perhaps America’s wild,wild west. Black hats and white hats, good guys and bad. A duel on a dusty road in the fading light of the day. Nope, this wasn’t that Japan. There were samurai alright but the duels were as real as the gunfights in the old west. This was more like San Francisco during its boom days. There was a strong middle class, an established government with concrete institutions and the samurai wore swords the way the city elders in San Francisco wore guns. It was a fashion statement and God help the innocent if the wearer was actually required to use the weapon. Nineteenth Century California, Eighteenth Century Edo Japan? Yea, I suppose it might be a reasonable comparison. A whole lot of posturing and very little in the way of substance. It looks to have been a great party though. Edo was more refined than gold rush California and a hell of a lot cleaner, but the carefree attitudes and the conveyance of leisure are prominent through out the prints. Many of the prints reproduced in the book are considered national treasures in Japan. The nostalgia of a time and a place lost in history. The woodblock print. Quite the medium of communication.
The work itself does not have that lifelike quality evolving in the greats of western classical art. The discipline of the Edo period woodblock print is closer to the dance hall posters of Toulouse Lautrec. There was another artist of the time that also made a reputation in this medium. I’ve got a cheap Wal-Mart reproduction hanging above the toilet. This is closest to what these Japanese artists were producing. They were not commissions for aristocrats and museums. These were commissions for local theaters and public consumption. There existed a middle class that had the disposable income and freedom of both expression and movement that gave rise for the need of public entertainment districts. So much comes to mind in our own culture. The theater district, the restaurant district, the live entertainment district, the red light district. Then there is the mythical sophistication of Japanese culture. It is a long standing tradition that the Japanese have a sophistication and knowledge of all things that allow them a superiority in bearing and negotiations that always intimidates their foe. That illusion is, or should be by now, shattered, shredded and utterly trashed. These are just people, sheltered by their island, allowed to homogenize and sterilize their culture to a shade that allows almost no sense to be made from any outside observer. Everyone is an alien in Japan. Or so it’s said. For me, the emotional response from these prints is one of familiarity. These are scenes and portraits of people acting like people. Working hard in the day and pursuing the carnal pleasures at night. Artists living amongst these people sketched and painted the street scenes maybe to stay in form during the time absent of the commercial art commissions. And then there were the picture books of the street scenes, entertainers, actors and prostitutes. The author alludes to the pornographic nature of some of these portraits, but I certainly see it. It’s not a western style, although I’m sure that some of the wood blocks produced were very explicit in their subject, those presented in the book were only titillating. I’m trying to super-impose these images on the culture and I come away with a Maxim magazine. Poetry, music, art and theater. Presented by very attractive people. These were the subjects contained in these prints. Very basic, very middle-class. The drawings are simple and convey a cartoon quality with them. Surprisingly, the author tries to describe these … these caricatures in terms familiar to the classics of the western renaissance. “The lines, the form, the acute depiction.” Come on. These prints evoke a real familiar response. It is art that is accessible to the masses. It is not passed down from on high to the illiterate mob to covet and hold in awe. These are prints that people hung up in their den or kitchen or entry and were gossiped about:
“Oh, you have the new print of Umtidy Scratch actor in the new production of Epic Love Tragedy”
“Yes, yes. My (husband, boyfriend, father, brother, none of the above) took me to the theater last week. Truly magical, it was, it was.”
Sharaku: Two Actors
I don’t know if the married women cavorted in the entertainment district with the same freedom as the men or whether they needed a chaperone, but it appears that there were family friendly sections of the pleasure quarter. It also appears that the married women of the period, like most of human history, exercised some degree of autonomy in spite of the thick veneer of paternalism. I’m sure that not all life in sealed Japan was good, but it is certainly the case that these were good times for many.
There are several main streams of this art form represented by a variety of artists. There are several schools and the author lightly touches off on the evolution of the various schools before he reaches what can be regarded as an interesting story. There was one artist that traveled into Edo one day, produced an incredible body of work in about a years time, then vanished into thin air after. Nobody knows anything about the guy; where he came from, where he went. Total mystery. Through out the book, the author has been careful to mention interesting facts about several of the artists and actors, some changed careers, some died, others had students that went on to bring the style and technique of wood block prints further along. The artist that the author literally gushes over is of the name Sharaku. Perhaps it’s the sophistication of the print or something radical in the style of portraiture, but I’m not seeing the genius in his work. The pieces presented for review in the book were all theater advertisements and actor head shots in costume. The story is very much that of a temp commercial artist. Sharaku was a talented artist that was able to produce a quantity of high quality work in a short period of time. Perhaps the revolution in appearance stems from the fact that instead of having a special insight into the soul of the character, this Sharaku simply portrayed what he saw. There was nothing unique what he did, at least from his own point of view, he collected his wages and left town. This description is juxtaposition against the image of the suffering Japanese woodblock print artist. You know, an Asian Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear in some vain effort to placate the voices in his head. My image is that of a robust market atmosphere with a small group of men gathered around the tools needed to make the prints they needed to sell to feed their respective families, prodding the master of the art that was at the heart of their product. Check that, prodding the artist the owner of the shop had dug up to convince the theater owners that his print shop was the one he needed to use to advertise his new show. The story told in the book includes all the information about the show the theater, the date, the actors, their popularity, the publisher of the prints, but there is almost no information about the artist, Sharaku. Odd it would seem to me. Like a lord moving amongst the commoners, indulging in a pass time meant for less than his station of in-the-manor-born. Great story, better fairy tale. I like the idea of a temp. The anti-Warhol, a man who isn’t debasing his great artistic passions by taking a job designing an ad campaign. Sharaku didn’t have any artistic passions, this was a job. Suffering artist pay is shit.
The other artists settled down and appeared to have founded schools from which they derived an income teaching the children of the affluent what it is to be an artist. Is this true, absolutely not, it is a complete fabrication. I am a working man and have never been able to understand what all the great artists and composers did for a living? There are some beautiful portraits and posters that all carry the same style except for one, Hokusai and his style of presentation that seems to have changed things. His work includes the famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji that has the iconic Back of a Wave on the Open Sea off Kanagawa included. This is the print of the large blue wave as it rears to crash down on some very tiny fishing vessels. There is quite a bit of space in the book devoted to his work and the work that seemed to emulate the style here. The bright colors, the clear lines, the cartoonesque quality that is neither humorous or naïve. There is also the leakage of techniques and methods from the west. But in their isolation and probably in their pride, the Japanese woodblock artist and publisher put an interesting flavor to the art form that stills reverberates through the magna and anime being produced today. The element that I see clearly lacking in the authors presentation is the cursory notice he give to the production team that actually produced these works. We are looking at the print and not the original art that was used to produce the woodblock. The colors and the detail are due to advances in technical aspects of production not artistic.
Hokusai: Back of a Wave
It is this artist and the work that his contemporaries produced that the content of the book take on the landscape. There is a chronology to the book and these artists were developing style post 1830. The author walks away from the portraits and moves into the landscapes that were produced until the late 1850’s as the book closes. This last portion of the book reproduces many of the prints and styles that are familiar in the west. It is these prints that seem to move me the most. The format that these artists take on is that of views of something. 56 Famous Places in Edo. Stuff like that. Again the author only bounces off the economic and social growth in and around Edo and the change in demand of the market. He concentrates on the art and ends the tour through the “Edo Period” with the death of Hiroshige in 1857. I guess it became fashionable to be decadent, which of course bleached all the decadence out of the pleasure quarter. Maybe it was the end of the shogunate. Maybe it was the nineteenth century equivalent of the western multi-national corporation buying out local businesses to gain market access and consolidate market share, standardizing product thereby wringing the soul out of it, and increasing distribution area. Who knows? The author appears to be the member of the mob encharged with enshrining and holding in awe those things decried great works of art. Or maybe he’s a temp writing a book around a collection of old magazine pictures set up in a big, imposing museum.
Hiroshige: The Fuji River on the Tokaido
I mentioned at several times that the emotion that these prints evoked in me was familiarity. Familiarity not only of place and action, but also of style. It is clear to any anime fan that the styles developed in these prints are the same being used today. I have been a fan of the underground world of graphic novels and anime since it was underground. I wasn’t an obsessed soul that was in pursuit of the most edgy stuff I could find. I was looking for something fresh and I did find it in the pages of magazines like Heavy Metal and artists like Mobius. These prints do ring a note of familiarity in me. A world we all dream of visiting. A floating world.