 Welcome to Udugawa Masters of the Japanese Print from 1770 to 1900. This is an exhibition about artists who belonged to the Udugawa School. Now there's a Japanese tradition of taking on a new professional name as you begin your career, and this new name often acknowledges who your teacher was. This leads to whole lineages of artists who share the same family name, passed down from teacher to student, and then as the student turns into a teacher from him to his students. And sometimes we can trace certain stylistic traits through these various generations of schools of artists. And sometimes it's more difficult to see what they have in common stylistically because what the students really learned from their teachers was more the sort of nuts and bolts of the arts business. And the artists who took on the Udugawa name worked in a wide variety of genres and in numerous individual styles, but they shared a remarkable sense of how to find success in this very competitive market. The first section of the show is called Establishing a Name Udugawa Toyoharu and Toyoharu was the first of the Udugawa artists who established the Udugawa School and he was active in the late 18th century. Toyoharu was best known for what are called perspective pictures. And what we're seeing here is an image of the interior of a kabuki theater. Toyoharu had managed to learn about one point perspective, one of the methods for depicting receding space in a two-dimensional format. He learned it from looking at European engravings. Now, during this period Japan had closed its borders to outside trade, but some western material including a little bit of European imagery did trickle in and Toyoharu got his hands on some of this and taught himself how to do one point perspective and applied it really enthusiastically to a lot of his work and it became kind of his trademark. So we see it here in this interior of a theater. This kind of image is really interesting to architectural historians because all of these wood frame buildings had a bad habit of burning down very, very few extant buildings of this sort. So the pictures provide a really interesting document for us. But more importantly it captures the energy and excitement that focused on kabuki theater in 18th century Edo which is the city that is modern day Tokyo. Kabuki was a relatively new theatrical art form and it aimed at a bourgeois audience. There were other theatrical forms that were much more ancient and much more aristocratic and kabuki was kind of considered a little on the tacky side by people who were great connoisseurs of the older theater forms. It was much more boisterous and melodramatic than the older theatrical forms with big energetic performances and actors really working the audience. It developed a very strong following with some really die-hard fans who had strong attachments to certain actors and it also became the theater became a great place to see and be seen a place to meet up with your friends. This print shows a performance in progress with the actors on the stage at the far end. You can tell it's the stage with a little roof over it. And you can see a catwalk that leads along one side of the audience space that was used for dramatic entrances by actors who would then walk through the audience to get to the stage. But what this image really shows us is the audience which is definitely not sitting still or sitting quietly for the performance. You can see food vendors who are walking through, touting their wares and everybody is chatting with each other. These were very long performances and everyone treated them more the way you would treat a ball game in the West that nobody sat still or silently for these. Now kabuki theaters were one of the main centers of activity and one of the primary draws for the entertainment districts of Japan's major cities. And this show focuses primarily on Edo which was the capital of Japan at this time. These entertainment districts in Tokyo it was called the Yoshihara were areas usually kind of at the edge of the city where brothels were actually licensed to operate. It was also the area where theaters were built up and where there were all sorts of other entertainment including puppet theaters and restaurants. Now this world of the Yoshihara or entertainment district came to be known as the Ukiyo or Floating World. This is actually an old Buddhist term but here it's used to refer to the whole culture of the entertainment district. Like the emotions depicted on a stage in a kabuki performance and like the relationships that men developed with their favorite prostitutes all that happened in the Yoshihara was understood to be fun but kind of fleeting, not terribly deep and really vaguely artificial. And so this term floating world refers to the fact that things are not entirely what they seem. People come and go nothing is really very permanent and it's all a little bit on the artificial side. Images of this Ukiyo or Floating World are called Ukiyo-e and that's the well-known term that we use to refer to pretty much all of the prints that we'll be seeing in this exhibition. This remarkable complex composition is what we call a double triptych meaning that it consists of six standard size sheets of paper. It's by Utagawa Toyokuni and the title is Far Works at Ryogoku Bridge dating to about 1825. It depicts a favorite annual event in Edo. The summertime fireworks display near Ryogoku Bridge which was a major thoroughfare crossing the Sumida River the major river that goes through Tokyo. Ukiyo-e imagery is remarkable in the history of Japanese art because earlier Japanese art forms had focused on the lives and customs of the very highest levels of aristocracy and usually this art depicted a highly idealized version of the very distant past. You never made a painting of current events until Ukiyo-e came along. Ukiyo-e depicted the current time and it depicted regular city dwellers and granted they were the more attractive segment of Edo society wealthy merchants and minor bureaucrats and actors and courtesans but they were members of classes that would have been considered really quite tacky and tawdry and this image shows just that cross-section of Edo society it's regular people who have come to see these fireworks the really regular people crowd onto the bridge and most of them have their backs turned to us to watch the fireworks but others closer to us are busy doing this and that and they include a woman carrying a screaming toddler servants carrying large bundles a young samurai who has stopped to flirt with a young woman and everybody is carrying a fan because we're in the middle of the really stinky hot Edo summer the wealthier people who have come to see the fireworks do so from rented boats that would cruise up and down the river and what we see on these boats underneath the bridge are few male clients and boatmen but mostly female entertainers and courtesans who are there to keep the male clients happy and all eyes in this lower section of the composition are on a central female figure who's wearing a black kimono who is standing perperiously at the edge of her boat looking like she might fall in at any moment now presumably she's drunk because pretty much everybody on these boats is and this just adds to this moment of tension as this drunken woman is about to fall in the water it really adds to the kind of riotous quality of the overall image and it reminds us that even though the boats are for the wealthier segment of society people were not necessarily behaving themselves any better down below than those who had to stand on the bridge now one of the interesting points in this composition is that typically these pleasure boats that people rented to cruise up and down the river had these nice poetic titles well we can only see the name of one of the boats and it's called Utagawa which actually makes sense as a name for a boat because Utagawa means lyrical river but in this case it's a little bit of blatant self-promotion on the part of the artist Utagawa Toyokuni and it's typical of the kinds of things that the Utagawa school did to promote themselves they never missed an opportunity to sort of toot their own horns the third section of the exhibition focuses on the third generation of Utagawa artists who also happened to be the most successful of the Utagawa artists the three big names of this generation were Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, and Kunisada and what we're seeing here is a rather unusual print by Hiroshige it's a print called the Shinobazu Benton Shrine and it dates to about 1820 to 22 it was from a series of prints that he made celebrating the Benton Shrines of Japan Benton is the Japanese goddess of beauty and there are shrines to her throughout Japan and there are little illustrations of these shrines and small vignettes up at the corner of each of these prints but the real focus of these prints is what we're called modern Benton goddesses who were just modern women we don't know if there are specific modern women because they're not named in the print they're probably more likely just sort of typical modern women who were considered extremely beautiful to have some of the qualities that Benton the goddess of beauty might have had Hiroshige is usually known as a landscape artist and so it's those little vignettes up in the corner that are more typical of his work but he was certainly capable of making really very attractive figures as well the woman in this image is somewhat demurely dressed and groomed suggesting that she is not a professional woman she is probably the wife of a wealthy man or the daughter of a wealthy man but what's most interesting about this print is what she's doing she's holding a woodblock print in one hand and there's a stack of woodblock prints in a box presumably full of woodblock prints just beneath her on the floor so what this is showing us is how collectors used or looked at their woodblock prints what she has are actor prints but the way she's handling and viewing them would have been typical of all prints one of the other things that's interesting about this image is that the print in her hand is actually identifiable as a real print and it has the signature of Udegawa Toyokuni who was one of the major artists of the previous generation and then there's one at the top of the stack on the floor that's signed by Udegawa Kunisada who was Hiroshige's contemporary the next section of the exhibition is called collaborative works and it focuses on series and single prints that were worked on by more than one artist all of them members of the Udegawa school this triptych is by Udegawa Kuniyoshi and Udegawa Hiroshige and it's called Night Garden it comes from a series called the Elegant Prince Genji that came out around 1853 Udegawa artists of the third and fourth generations collaborated on many print projects publishers loved these collaborations because you could really promote it like when you have a movie with two really major movie stars in it it's more of a draw than if you have only one artists like these collaborative projects because they served as a way of highlighting their special talents for instance in this triptych Kunisada who was famous for his beautifully costumed ladies and actors provides the figures for the composition while Hiroshige who was famous for his landscapes provides the setting and as if you didn't get it that each of them was providing their own specialty each artist has signed his work near the part that he contributed this sends a message to the art market that if you want a really great figure you go to Kunisada and if you want a really great landscape you go to Hiroshige this triptych depicts a night scene and a lot of, like a lot of Udegawa night scenes the figures look like they're glowing in the dark that's because artists of this period were fine with toning down the setting in night scenes but they really didn't like to hide their figures in the gloom because they wanted you to see all the beautiful details of their white faces and colorful garments so they really stand out in front of this dark background one nice feature of this night scene is the lantern which sends light upward from its open top that light effect comes from a special printing technique called bokashi the printer in bokashi the printer applies ink to the printing block for the night sky then he very carefully wipes the ink away in the area that's supposed to have lantern light then when he prints the block the area that has ink turns this dark gray of the night sky and the area that doesn't have ink where it's been wiped away maintains the white of the page and because of the wiping the edges are blurred so they're not like the sharp edges that would have been created by the carving of a wood block and the light therefore looks more natural if you look carefully at many of the prints in the show you'll see masterful use of this bokashi technique it turns up especially in the sky and in water but also on the ground and on the edges of tree trunks meaning where they want to give a sense of atmosphere or even a sense of contour the next section is called utagawa style and market dominance and it's about the many utagawa artists who were not as well known there are several utagawa artists that gained considerable celebrity status in their own time and they continue to be well known among collectors today but there were also many more artists who used the utagawa name who did not find quite the same degree of success this image of westerners looking at an elephant is by one of those less well known artists utagawa Yoshii-ku who was a student of Kuniyoshi one of the more successful ones like several utagawa artists of the fourth generation Yoshii-ku designed some prints that fall into a new genre called Yokohama-A of the people of the port city of Yokohama Yokohama-A offered depictions of the strange costumes, inventions and behavior of these new visitors to Japan and Yoshii-ku presents his curious audience with an image of both the interesting costumes of westerners and an incredible elephant elephants were known of in Japan but really only as kind of mythic creatures and finally in the late 19th century an elephant actually made it to Japan and they got to see one in person Yoshii-ku is kind of claiming to present a documentary image but it's actually not a very faithful representation if you look closely the elephant has four nostrils so clearly he had not had a chance to study an elephant very closely but for this kind of audience it didn't really matter what they really wanted was something exotic and entertaining and if it was truthful that was nice but it was not as necessary as the entertainment value the last section of the show highlights really what was the last generation of Uchigawa artists and that's the fourth generation by this time Ukiyo-e was already waning as a style both for paintings and for prints western culture and new technologies were distracting people from the woodblock print market and really changing the standards of beauty for worldly Japanese customers but at least three fourth generation Uchigawa artists managed to maintain a strong following in part by creating really fantastic imagery of the sort that no camera could ever capture and also by taking the woodblock print to new extremes using really virtuoso printing techniques and highly individualized artistic styles and perhaps the most unusual of the later Uchigawa artists was an artist named Kawanabe Kyosai and you can see he doesn't actually take the Uchigawa name but he did train with the artist Kuniyoshi when he was very young Kuniyoshi being one of that third generation that was so popular Kyosai had also studied with the Kano school which was a group of artists ink painting very decorative and expressive ink painting and from them he learned all sorts of calligraphic styles and ways of using the paint brush to create wonderful textures and rhythms and as a result of this training Kyosai's prints often look a lot like ink paintings with big black lines that mimic brush strokes and they taper from thick to thin and they offer the occasional ragged edge so you can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the page although of course the artist's hand never moved across these pages because they're prints some very clever wood block carver came in and turned Kyosai's drawings into blocks for printing so these could be mass produced probably the most dramatic example in this show is this image of Shoki the Demon Queller his cloak is made up entirely of these angular twisting brush strokes all recreated by the carver and this style gives the figure a really dynamic feel like he's been dashing back and forth and his costume is still catching up the subject of the image is Shoki a mythical character who's famous for taming demons he doesn't actually kill them he just sort of turns them around pictures of Shoki are often displayed outside homes on a traditional Japanese holiday called Boys Day Shoki is celebrated and worshiped on Boys Day because he has a reputation for being particularly effective against the demons who threaten the well-being of young sons little boys so on Boys Day many homes will display images of Shoki and it's likely that this print was made for that kind of purpose