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During the early modern period in Japan, peace and prosperity
allowed elite and popular arts and culture to flourish in Edo
(Tokyo) and Kyoto. The historic first showing outside Japan of Ito
Jakuchu's thirty-scroll series titled Colorful Realm of Living
Beings (ca. 1757-66) in 2012 prompted a reimagining of artists and
art making in this context. These essays give attention to
Jakuchu's spectacular series as well as to works by a range of
contemporary artists. Selected contributions address issues of
professional roles, including copying and imitation, display and
memorialization, and makers' identities. Some explore the new form
of painting, ukiyo-e, in the context of the urban society that
provided its subject matter and audiences; others discuss the
spectrum of amateur and professional Edo pottery and
interrelationships between painting and other media. Together, they
reveal the fluidity and dynamism of artists' identities during a
time of great significance in the country's history. Published by
the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts/Distributed by Yale University Press
Today we think of ukiyo-e-"the pictures of the floating world"-as
masterpieces of Japanese art, highly prized throughout the world.
Yet it is often said that ukiyo-e were little appreciated in their
own time and were even used as packing material for ceramics. In
Picturing the Floating World Julie Nelson Davis debunks this myth
and demonstrates that ukiyo-e was thoroughly appreciated as a field
of artistic production, worthy of connoisseurship and canonization
by its contemporaries. Putting these images back into their dynamic
context, she shows how consumers, critics, and makers produced and
sold, appraised and collected, described and recorded ukiyo-e. She
recovers this multilayered world of pictures in which some were
made for a commercial market, backed by savvy entrepreneurs looking
for new ways to make a profit, while others were produced for
private coteries and high-ranking connoisseurs seeking to enrich
their cultural capital. The book opens with an analysis of period
documents to establish the terms of appraisal brought to ukiyo-e in
late eighteenth-century Japan, mapping the evolution of the genre
from a century earlier and the development of its typologies and
the creation of a canon of makers-both of which have defined the
field ever since. Organized around divisions of major technological
and aesthetic developments, the book reveals how artistic practice
and commercial enterprise were intertwined throughout ukiyo-e's
history, from its earliest imagery through the twentieth century.
The depiction of particular subjects in and for the floating world
of urban Edo and the process of negotiating this within the larger
field of publishing are examined to further ground ukiyo-e as
material culture, as commodities in a mercantile economy. Picturing
the Floating World offers a new approach: a critical yet accessible
analysis of the genre as it was developed in its social, cultural,
and political milieu. The book introduces students, collectors, and
enthusiasts to ukiyo-e as a genre under construction in its own
time while contributing to our understanding of early modern visual
production.
This compelling account of collaboration in the genre of ukiyo-e
(pictures of the floating world) offers a new approach to
understanding the production and reception of print culture in
early modern Japan. It provides a corrective to the perception that
the ukiyo-e tradition was the product of the creative talents of
individual artists, revealing instead the many identities that made
and disseminated printed work. Julie Nelson Davis demonstrates by
way of examples from the later eighteenth century that this popular
genre was the result of an exchange among publishers, designers,
writers, carvers, printers, patrons, buyers, and readers. By
recasting these works as examples of a network of commercial and
artistic cooperation, she off ers a nuanced view of the complexity
of this tradition and expands our understanding of the dynamic
processes of production, reception, and intention in fl oating
world print culture. Four case studies give evidence of what
constituted modes of collaboration among artistic producers in the
period. In each case Davis explores a different configuration of
collaboration: that between a teacher and a student, two painters
and their publishers, a designer and a publisher, and a writer and
an illustrator. Each investigates a mode of partnership through a
single work: a specially commissioned print, a lavishly illustrated
album, a printed handscroll, and an inexpensive illustrated novel.
These case studies explore the diversity of printed things in the
period ranging from expensive works made for a select circle of
connoisseurs to those meant to be sold at a modest price to a large
audience. They take up familiar subjects from the floating world -
connoisseurship, beauty, sex, and humor - and explore multiple
dimensions of inquiry vital to that dynamic culture: the status of
art, the evaluation of beauty, the representation of sexuality, and
the tension between mind and body. Where earlier studies of
woodblock prints have tended to focus on the individual artist,
Partners in Print takes the subject a major step forward to a
richer picture of the creative process. Placing these works in
their period context not only revealsan aesthetic network
responsive to and shaped by the desires of consumers in a specific
place and time, but also contributes to a larger discussion about
the role of art and the place of the material text in the early
modern world.
Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) was one of the most
influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e, `pictures of
the floating world', in late eighteenth-century Japan, and was
widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In this book,
Julie Nelson Davis draws on a wide range of period sources, makes a
close study of selected print sets and reinterprets Utamaro in the
context of his times. Offering a new approach to issues of the
status of the artist and the construction of gender, identity,
sexuality and celebrity in the Edo period, and now in an updated
edition containing a new preface and many new images, this book is
a significant contribution to the field, and will be a key work for
readers interested in Japanese arts and cultures.
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