Adam's Asian Art - Fine Oriental Ceramics, Sculptures & Art November 3rd 2018

138 Saturday 3 rd November 2018 Ukiyo-e or ‘floating world pictures’ were a style of woodblock prints that emerged in Japan in the 17th century. The rise of the urban classes influenced the development of ukiyo-e art as it was essentially created by and for the townspeople of the main cities in Japan. Ukiyo was initially associated with Buddhist ideology however it came to be thought of in relation to the hedonistic nature of the pleasure quarters in Edo. The Kabuki theatre was one aspect of the entertainment found in the pleasure quarters and its popularity led to a rise in Kabuki prints which depicted favourite actors or scenes from the plays. By combining the ‘floating world’ with art the term, ukiyo-e would come “to describe the recent revolution in image-making and to suggest the unprecedented role that such images played in a wider cultural revolution.” (Timothy Clark, Image and Style in the Floating World: The Origins and Early Development of Ukiyo-e”, The Dawn of the Floating World, Royal Academy of Arts, 2001, p. 11.) There was a decline of the official schools of painting in Japanese art since as Seiroku Noma explains “Classical tales of military and religious heroes, Buddhist icons, portraits of Chinese sages – these subjects were of little interest to the city dweller of Early Modern Japan.” (Seiroku Noma, Arts of Japan Vol: 2 Late Medieval to Modern, Kodansha, 1978, p. 188). This led to a development of genre painting, which depicted ordinary people and everyday life. While it had been on the rise since the end of the Muromachi period (1333-1568) in order for it to become an art form of the masses, artists needed to develop a process of producing the works on a large scale at affordable prices. The first art form to try and solve this problem was the shikomi-e (ready-made pictures) but they were made by hand and thus unsuitable for mass production. Instead the use of wood-block printing presented the potential to produce large-scale reproductions of an artist’s design. As a medium, woodblock in Japan dates as far back as the eighth century yet it was not until the 17th century that it was used to depict artistic and literary scenes. The emergence of Kanazoshi, a literary genre dedicated to depicting the pleasures of Edo urban culture offered the “townspeople of Edo”, as Tadashi Kobayashi argues, “their first opportunity to enjoy art.” (Tadashi Kobayashi, Introduction to Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints, Kodansha, 1992, p. 65.) The early woodblock prints were monochrome, which could then be painted by hand in order to enliven the scene. Yet the prints had second- ary functions as illustrations of the written word rather than as individual images in their own right. As the country moved into the twentieth century, there was increasing tendency towards adopting more modern forms of artistic production. This had a particular effect on the ukiyo-e tradition as new printing technologies such as the intro- duction of moveable type, came to dominate the production processes. Despite this modernisation, two art movements emerged simultaneously in the early 20th century, one known as shin-hanga, that revitalized traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods. It maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system, where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor. The shin-hanga movement flourished from around 1915 to 1942 inspired by European Impressionism, in which the artists incorporated Western elements such as the effects of light and the ex- pression of individual moods, but focused on strictly traditional themes of landscapes (fukeiga), famous places (meishō), beautiful women (bijinga), kabuki actors (yakusha-e), and birds-and-flowers (kachō-e). It presented an idealised and often romanticised view of Japanese society that was somewhat at odds with the reality of the period. An air of nostalgia pervades, as the artists attempt to hold back the changing tides of their country. The other was the sōsaku-hanga (creative prints) movement which advocated the opposite principles. It focused on the idea of the artist as the sole creator of the work, the author, advocating its three tenets of “self-drawn” (jiga), “self-carved” (jikoku) and “self-printed” (jizuri). An artistic desire rooted in self-expression rather than communal practice, as seen in the work by Koshiro Onchi (lot 292), who is known as the father of the movement. The 1951 São Paulo Art Biennial wit- nessed the success of the creative print movement. Both of the Japanese winners, Kanae Yamamoto (1882 - 1946) and Kiyoshi Saitō (1907–1997) were printmakers. These artists were keen to realise the full potential of woodblock printing, moving away from more traditional themes and incorporating new stylistic techniques that drastically altered the conven- tional aesthetic of ukiyo-e. Ukiyo-e