Japanese Sumo Painting

[Azalee Freas]

Ukiyoe[a] is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world'.

In 1603, the city of Edo (Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The chōnin class (merchants, craftsmen and workers), positioned at the bottom of the social order, benefited the most from the city's rapid economic growth. They began to indulge in and patronize the entertainment of kabuki theatre, geisha, and courtesans of the pleasure districts. The term ukiyo ('floating world') came to describe this hedonistic lifestyle. Printed or painted ukiyo-e works were popular with the chōnin class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them.

The earliest ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s, with Hishikawa Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints of beautiful women. Colour prints were introduced gradually, and at first were only used for special commissions. By the 1740s, artists such as Okumura Masanobu used multiple woodblocks to print areas of colour. In the 1760s, the success of Suzuki Harunobu's "brocade prints" led to full-colour production becoming standard, with ten or more blocks used to create each print. Some ukiyo-e artists specialized in making paintings, but most works were prints. Artists rarely carved their own woodblocks for printing; rather, production was divided between the artist, who designed the prints; the carver, who cut the woodblocks; the printer, who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto handmade paper; and the publisher, who financed, promoted, and distributed the works. As printing was done by hand, printers were able to achieve effects impractical with machines, such as the blending or gradation of colours on the printing block.

Specialists have prized the portraits of beauties and actors by masters such as Torii Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Sharaku that were created in the late 18th century. The 19th century also saw the continuation of masters of the ukiyo-e tradition, with the creation of Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of the most well-known works of Japanese art, and Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Following the deaths of these two masters, and against the technological and social modernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, ukiyo-e production went into steep decline.

However, in the 20th century there was a revival in Japanese printmaking: the shin-hanga ('new prints') genre capitalized on Western interest in prints of traditional Japanese scenes, and the sōsaku-hanga ('creative prints') movement promoted individualist works designed, carved, and printed by a single artist. Prints since the late 20th century have continued in an individualist vein, often made with techniques imported from the West.

Ukiyo-e was central to forming the West's perception of Japanese art in the late 19th century, particularly the landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige. From the 1870s onward, Japonisme became a prominent trend and had a strong influence on the early French Impressionists such as Edgar Degas, douard Manet and Claude Monet, as well as influencing Post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh, and Art Nouveau artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Since antiquity, Japanese art had found patrons in the aristocracy, military governments, and religious authorities.[2] Until the 16th century, the lives of the common people had not been a main subject of painting, and even when they were included, the works were luxury items made for the ruling samurai and rich merchant classes.[3] Later works appeared by and for townspeople, including inexpensive monochromatic paintings of female beauties and scenes of the theatre and pleasure districts. The hand-produced nature of these shikomi-e (仕込絵) limited the scale of their production, a limit that was soon overcome by genres that turned to mass-produced woodblock printing.[4]

[L]iving only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking sake, and diverting oneself just in floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current: this is what we call ukiyo.

Ukiyo-e reached a peak in the late 18th century with the advent of full-colour prints, developed after Edo returned to prosperity under Tanuma Okitsugu following a long depression.[41] These popular colour prints came to be called nishiki-e, or 'brocade pictures', as their brilliant colours seemed to bear resemblance to imported Chinese Shuchiang brocades, known in Japanese as Shokkō nishiki.[42] The first to emerge were expensive calendar prints, printed with multiple blocks on very fine (or finer than standard) paper with heavy, opaque inks. These prints had the number of days for each month hidden in the design, and were sent at the New Year[f] as personalized greetings, bearing the name of the patron rather than the artist. The blocks for these prints were later re-used for commercial production, obliterating the patron's name and replacing it with that of the artist.[43]

In the 1770s, Utagawa Toyoharu produced a number of uki-e perspective prints[52] that demonstrated a mastery of Western perspective techniques that had eluded his predecessors in the genre.[36] Toyoharu's works helped pioneer the landscape as an ukiyo-e subject, rather than merely a background for human figures.[53] In the 19th century, Western-style perspective techniques were absorbed into Japanese artistic culture, and deployed in the refined landscapes of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige,[54] the latter a member of the Utagawa school that Toyoharu founded. This school was to become one of the most influential,[55] and produced works in a far greater variety of genres than any other school.[56]

A law went into effect in 1790 requiring prints to bear a censor's seal of approval to be sold. Censorship increased in strictness over the following decades, and violators could receive harsh punishments. From 1799 even preliminary drafts required approval.[61] A group of Utagawa-school offenders including Toyokuni had their works repressed in 1801, and Utamaro was imprisoned in 1804 for making prints of 16th-century political and military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi.[62]

Edo was the primary centre of ukiyo-e production throughout the Edo period. Another major centre developed in the Kamigata region of areas in and around Kyoto and Osaka. In contrast to the range of subjects in the Edo prints, those of Kamigata tended to be portraits of kabuki actors. The style of the Kamigata prints was little distinguished from those of Edo until the late 18th century, partly because artists often moved back and forth between the two areas.[70] Colours tend to be softer and pigments thicker in Kamigata prints than in those of Edo.[71] In the 19th century, many of the prints were designed by kabuki fans and other amateurs.[72]

Following the deaths of Hokusai and Hiroshige[88] and the Meiji Restoration of 1868, ukiyo-e suffered a sharp decline in quantity and quality.[89] The rapid Westernization of the Meiji period that followed saw woodblock printing turn its services to journalism, and face competition from photography. Practitioners of pure ukiyo-e became more rare, and tastes turned away from a genre seen as a remnant of an obsolescent era.[88] Artists continued to produce occasional notable works, but by the 1890s the tradition was moribund.[90]

Aside from Dutch traders, who had had trading relations dating to the beginning of the Edo period,[95] Westerners paid little notice to Japanese art before the mid-19th century, and when they did they rarely distinguished it from other art from the East.[95] Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg spent a year in the Dutch trading settlement Dejima, near Nagasaki, and was one of the earliest Westerners to collect Japanese prints. The export of ukiyo-e thereafter slowly grew, and at the beginning of the 19th century Dutch merchant-trader Isaac Titsingh's collection drew the attention of connoisseurs of art in Paris.[96]

The arrival in Edo of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 led to the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, which opened Japan to the outside world after over two centuries of seclusion. Ukiyo-e prints were amongst the items he brought back to the United States.[97] Such prints had appeared in Paris from at least the 1830s, and by the 1850s were numerous;[98] reception was mixed, and even when praised ukiyo-e was generally thought inferior to Western works which emphasized mastery of naturalistic perspective and anatomy.[99] Japanese art drew notice at the International Exhibition of 1867 in Paris,[95] and became fashionable in France and England in the 1870s and 1880s.[95] The prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige played a prominent role in shaping Western perceptions of Japanese art.[100] At the time of their introduction to the West, woodblock printing was the most common mass medium in Japan, and the Japanese considered it of little lasting value.[101]

Early Europeans promoters and scholars of ukiyo-e and Japanese art included writer Edmond de Goncourt and art critic Philippe Burty,[102] who coined the term Japonism.[103][g] Stores selling Japanese goods opened, including those of douard Desoye in 1862 and art dealer Siegfried Bing in 1875.[104] From 1888 to 1891 Bing published the magazine Artistic Japan[105] in English, French, and German editions,[106] and curated an ukiyo-e exhibition at the cole des Beaux-Arts in 1890 attended by artists such as Mary Cassatt.[107]

Japanese art, and particularly ukiyo-e prints, came to influence Western art from the time of the early Impressionists.[111] Early painter-collectors incorporated Japanese themes and compositional techniques into their works as early as the 1860s:[98] the patterned wallpapers and rugs in Manet's paintings were inspired by the patterned kimono found in ukiyo-e pictures, and Whistler focused his attention on ephemeral elements of nature as in ukiyo-e landscapes.[112] Van Gogh was an avid collector, and painted copies in oil of prints by Hiroshige and Eisen.[113] Degas and Cassatt depicted fleeting, everyday moments in Japanese-influenced compositions and perspectives.[114] ukiyo-e's flat perspective and unmodulated colours were a particular influence on graphic designers and poster makers.[115] Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs displayed his interest not only in ukiyo-e's flat colours and outlined forms, but also in their subject matter: performers and prostitutes.[116] He signed much of this work with his initials in a circle, imitating the seals on Japanese prints.[116] Other artists of the time who drew influence from ukiyo-e include Monet,[111] La Farge,[117] Gauguin,[118] and Les Nabis members such as Bonnard[119] and Vuillard.[120] French composer Claude Debussy drew inspiration for his music from the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, most prominently in La mer (1905).[121] Imagist poets such as Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound found inspiration in ukiyo-e prints; Lowell published a book of poetry called Pictures of the Floating World (1919) on oriental themes or in an oriental style.[122]

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