Ukiyo-e

• 1. Social Origins And Floating World

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  In 1603, the city of Edo became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The merchant class, positioned at the bottom of the social order, benefited 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-e translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world'. This hedonistic lifestyle came to define the genre's name. Printed or painted ukiyo-e works were popular with the merchant class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them. Before this period, Japanese art had found patrons in the aristocracy, military governments, and religious authorities. Until the 16th century, the lives of common people had not been a main subject of painting. 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 early works limited the scale of production, a limit that was soon overcome by genres that turned to mass-produced woodblock printing.

• 2. Technical Evolution Of Color Printing

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  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. Early colours were limited to pink and green; techniques expanded over the following two decades to allow up to five colours. The mid-1760s brought full-colour nishiki-e prints made from ten or more woodblocks. To keep the blocks for each colour aligned correctly, registration marks called kento were placed on one corner and an adjacent side. Printers first used natural colour dyes made from mineral or vegetable sources. Cheaper and more consistent synthetic aniline dyes arrived from the West in 1864. The colours were harsher and brighter than traditional pigments.

• 3. Masters Of The Golden Age

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  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. Utamaro made his name in the 1790s with his okubi-e large-headed pictures of beautiful women portraits, focusing on the head and upper torso. He experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in the features, expressions, and backdrops of subjects from a wide variety of class and background. Appearing suddenly in 1794 and disappearing just as suddenly ten months later, the prints of the enigmatic Sharaku are amongst ukiyo-e's best known. Sharaku produced striking portraits of kabuki actors, introducing a greater level of realism into his prints that emphasized the differences between the actor and the portrayed character. The landscape genre has come to dominate Western perceptions of ukiyo-e, though ukiyo-e had a long history preceding these late-era masters. Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is one of the most well-known works of Japanese art, and Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō followed.

• 4. Western Influence And Japonisme

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  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, Édouard 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. Early painter-collectors incorporated Japanese themes and compositional techniques into their works as early as the 1860s. Van Gogh was an avid collector, and painted copies in oil of prints by Hiroshige and Eisen. Degas and Cassatt depicted fleeting, everyday moments in Japanese-influenced compositions and perspectives. Ukiyo-e's flat perspective and unmodulated colours were a particular influence on graphic designers and poster makers. By the end of the 19th century, the popularity of ukiyo-e in the West drove prices beyond the means of most collectors. Some, such as Degas, traded their own paintings for such prints.

• 5. Decline And Modern Revivals

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  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. 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 obsolete era. Artists continued to produce occasional notable works, but by the 1890s the tradition was moribund. 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. The sosaku hanga creative prints movement promoted individualist works designed, carved, and printed by a single artist. Kanae Yamamoto produced Fisherman using woodblock printing in 1904, a technique until then frowned upon by the Japanese art establishment. Prints since the late 20th century have continued in an individualist vein, often made with techniques imported from the West.

• 6. Production Methods And Commercial Systems

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  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. Publishing was highly competitive; over a thousand publishers are known from throughout the period. The number peaked at around 250 in the 1840s and 1850s, 200 in Edo alone, and slowly shrank following the opening of Japan until about 40 remained at the opening of the 20th century. The publishers owned the woodblocks and copyrights, and from the late 18th century enforced copyrights through the Picture Book and Print Publishers Guild. Prints that went through several pressings were particularly profitable, as the publisher could reuse the woodblocks without further payment to the artist or woodblock cutter.