Different Japanese Arts :

UKIYO-E

Ukiyo-e literally, pictures of the floating world. A genre of art, chiefly in the medium of the woodblock print, that arose early in the Edo period (1600-1868) and built up a broad popular market among the middle classes. Subject matter tended to focus on the brothel districts and the kabuki theaters, and formats ranged from single-sheet prints and greeting cards to albums and book illustrations. Ukiyo-e flourished throughout Japan, attaining their most characteristic form in the prints produced in Edo (now Tokyo) from about 1680 to the 1850s.

Early Ukiyo-e

The distinctive milieu from which ukiyo-e would emerge was flourishing as early as the Kan'ei era (1624-1644). Genre paintings (fuzokuga) of the time depict pleasure seekers of every social class thronging the entertainment district beside the river Kamogawa in Kyoto. It was in such districts, in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, that there developed the freewheeling way of life of the ukiyo, or "floating world," and the genre of art, ukiyo-e, that glorified it.

Sex manuals (shunga; literally, "spring pictures") and courtesan critiques (yujo hyobanki) were among the earliest types of printed ukiyo-e.

• Shunga were either books or albums that depicted highly explicit love scenes, though rarely are couples completely naked. Few of the sex manuals from the 1660s and early 1670s have survived and none are signed; the earliest attributions are to Hishikawa Moronobu and Sugimura Jihei, who were active in the late 17th century, and thereafter shunga remained a genre at which most ukiyo-e artists tried their hand.

• The critiques of courtesans, essentially picture books with commentary, contained stylized portraits of the leading courtesans of the day, engaged in some casual activity such as reading or adjusting their hair. The interest of such scenes is chiefly in the poses and the draping of kimono. A similar type of picture was the bijin-e ("beautiful-women picture"), in which courtesans of the highest rank (tayu) were depicted, often with their entourages. Pictures of courtesans remained popular throughout the history of ukiyo-e; the Kaigetsudo school (early 18th century) of ukiyo-e painters rarely turned to any other subject, and many of Kitagawa Utamaro's most memorable prints were of these stylish beauties.

Edo Ukiyo-e

By the late 17th century, the centre of ukiyo-e had shifted from Kamigata (the Kyoto-Osaka area) to Edo, where the single-sheet print, probably initially intended for mounting on scrolls (kakemono-e), seems to have become a specialty in the closing years of the Genroku era (1688-1704).

It was the development of the single-sheets print, however, that marked a turning point n the history of ukiyo-e, the coming of age of which was closely joined to that of kabuki. A major role in the development of kabuki was played by Ichikawa Danjuro I, who invented a bombastic style of acting known as aragoto that became immensely popular in Edo.

Portrayals of actors (yakusha-e) in popular roles had already become standard subject matter of ukiyo-e, but it was the Torii school that achieved the greatest success in rendering the pyrotechnics of an aragoto performance in graphic terms. Torii Kiyonobu I and Torii Kiyomasu I perfected a style that, with its vigorous use of line and robust forms, was particularly appropriate for theatrical subjects.

Later ukiyo-e, especially those of Utagawa Toyoharu, included landscapes. Another important ukiyo-e artist of the second quarter of the 18th century was Nishikawa Sukenobu, a native of Kyoto, whose illustrated books presenting scenes from daily life or from classical poetry gained extraordinary popularity throughout the country. His work displayed a delicacy that set it apart from Edo ukiyo-e of the time and influenced the subsequent development of the genre.

Colour Prints

In about 1745, a technique was conceived for registering successive blocks, each printing a different color on a single sheet. The resulting prints, called benizuri-e (pictures printed in red) because the most striking color was a red derived from the petals of the safflower (benibana), were produced only in two or three colors. It was not until 1764 that the first full-color prints appeared, a development that is closely associated with the sudden popularity of the work of Suzuki Haruobu's style. These new prints, called nishiki-e (brocade pictures) or edo-e (Edo pictures), represented the final stage of technical advancement in color printing achieved in the Edo period.

The Stylistic Revolution brought about by the development of full-color printing soon affected the traditional genre of yakusha-e. From about 1770, in the work of the major innovators Katsukawa Shunsho and Ippitsusai Buncho, actors were for the first time presented as individuals with distinctive features, whereas previously they could be distinguished only by the crest (mon) on their kimono.

In the 1770s poets of kyoka, a type of comic verse, and artists began to collaborate in the production of some extraordinarily handsome books combining kyoka with ukiyo-e illustrations.

The Golden Age of Ukiyo-e

The late 18th century was largely a period of consolidation rather than innovation; however, development of the more generous oban format and the introduction of diptychs and triptychs led to more complex composition. After 1790, ukiyo-e images acquired a new intensity and styles began to succeed one another with greater rapidity. Utamaro and Sharaku achieved a heightened closeness to their subjects by using the format of the okubi-e or bust portrait.

Utamaro's women are extremely sensuous and the masculinity of Sharaku's female impersonators (onnagata) infuses his portrayals. Utamaro was one of the first to isolate his figures against a brilliant mica background, and did so with a flair that other artists of the time, among them Hosoda Eishi and Utagawa Toyokuni, only rarely managed to equal.

After 1800, there appears to have been a radical change in taste, accompanied by a faltering of inspiration in design and deterioration in the quality of printing. Short figures with hunched shoulders and sharp features replaced the tall, elegant figures of the 1770s and 1780s, kimono patterns became coarser and more strident, and pictures of actors tended toward the exaggerated and grotesque. One reason for this was change in the print-buying public, which had grown larger and presumably less discriminating, resulting in prints that were produced hastily-many showing faulty registration of colors-and in great numbers.

Landscape

The emergence of the landscape print was a relatively late phenomenon in the history of ukiyo-e. Prior to Hokusai's Fugaku Sanjurokkei (1823, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji), landscape as independent subject matter for ukiyo-e was largely unknown. Other artists soon followed Hokusai's lead, and landscape achieved a popularity that rivaled the established genres of portraiture. Active as an artist for some 60 years, Hokusai developed a style that was highly individual, combining Chinese and Western influences with elements drawn from the native Kano school, the Tosa school, and the Rimpa tradition. He was also a prolific draftsman who employed a variety of techniques to create the astounding array of images in his famous 13-volume Hokusai manga (1814-1849, Hokusai's Sketches).

Hokusai's only true rival in landscape was Ando Hiroshige, whose great Tokaido gojusantsugi (1833-1834, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road) brought him fame and a host of imitators. Hiroshige displays in this and other works a greater concern than Hokusai with atmosphere, light, and weather. Drawing on the style of certain of the landscape paintings of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), his work was also influenced by the contemporaneous Maruyama-Shijo school and by Western realism.

As an integral element of the Edo-period culture that it mirrored, ukiyo-e was unable to survive that society's demise in the wake of the radical Westernization that transformed Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

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