Upcoming Exhibitions
The Floating World: Ukiyo-e Prints from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art
March 31 – June 24, 2012
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Mama no momiji, Tekona no yashiro,Tsugi hashi [Number 94: Maple leaves and the Tekona shrine and bridge at Mama], 1857, ink on paper. Gift of Wallace B. Rogers, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.
The fleeting beauty of nature and the efflorescence of pleasure are depicted in 50 colorful ukiyo-e prints dating from Japan’s Edo Period (1600–1868). Beautiful women, actors and the theater, landscapes, narrative scenes, and decorative themes feature widely in ukiyo-e prints, an art form that later influenced masters such as Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh. Ukiyo-e literally translates as “images of the floating world” and refers to the genre of woodblock printing that arose in the metropolitan culture of Edo, today known as Tokyo. Wallace B. Rogers, founder of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, collected the prints on view in just under five years during the 1920s.
During the Edo period, power in Japan rested with the Tokugawa shoguns, whereas the emperor in Kyoto played a ceremonial role. Despite isolation from the West, this period witnessed much economic development, urbanization, and a growing merchant population with the means and leisure time to pursue recreational activities. Theater and entertainment districts such as Yoshiwara in Edo, the shogunate administrative center, became destinations where the new elite could flaunt their fortunes. Reflective of Japan’s growing sense of elegance and refinement, these places of pleasure depended on the illusion of grandeur and thus reflected the concept of an impermanent, or “floating,” world. Many ukiyo-e prints served as advertisements for the districts’ theaters, restaurants, teahouses, geisha, and courtesans, and as guidebooks appealing to the Japanese love of nature. Printed in multiples, they were largely affordable.
The emergence of publishing houses helped to popularize ukiyo-e prints. Artists, craftsmen, and printers worked in collaboration. The artist depicted an idea using ink, which an assistant then traced. Craftsmen glued the tracing facedown onto a block of wood and then cut away the white areas of the paper, creating a relief. The block was inked and printed. After the artist’s approval, these prints in turn were glued facedown onto woodblocks. One block relief was carved for each color to be printed. The resulting set of woodblocks were inked in different colors and sequentially pressed into paper, some more than once to achieve desired color effects. While early ukiyo-e prints were black ink only, by the mid-18th century the use of multiple blocks allowed for three- or four-color prints. By the 19th century, as many as 16 panels might be carved to produce one print.
