Japanese Edo prints at the Cinquantenaire Museum

 Hiroshige - "Hakone" (High Rocks) from The fifty-three stages of the Tōkaidō (c. 1832)

Today I rode my bike up to the Cinquantenaire to have lunch with Simon, a friend of ours from church.  We had a nice chat over lunch, and then headed off to the Cinquantenaire museum.  I've written before about the wonders contained therein, and how the admission fee for accessing the permanent collection is waived on the afternoon of the first Wednesday of each month.

As it happened we weren't going to the permanent collection, but rather to a temporary exhibition entitled "Ukiyo-e", showcasing Japanese woodblock prints from the Cinquantenaire collection.  According to the website the Cinquantenaire museum has one of the largest collections of Japanese woodblock prints in the world, and the curators decided that it was time to take them out of their library and show them to the public.

Harunobu - Young Women Fishing with a Net (c. 1767-68)

According to the curators, the Japanese term ukiyo-e means literally “pictures of the floating world”. The term “floating world” (ukiyo) comes from Buddhism, and refers to life on earth, transitory and full of suffering.  Since the 17th century the term ukiyo has been synonymous with a world of fleeting pleasures, and it is this hedonistic meaning paired with the suffix e (“picture”) that creates the concept of Ukiyo-e: fleeting hedonistic pleasure in pictures.

Degenova - MidAtlantic (c. 2014)

Nowadays the term is associated with traditional printmaking, which my friend Darren Degenova studied during his time in Japan... in fact he used some of those techniques for the piece we used to advertise MidAtlantic, the concert programme that Dina Namer and I presented in March of 2014.  I have enjoyed Darren's work for a long time and was really interested to learn more about this tradition.

Hokusai - A Shower Below the Summit from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830-1833)

Wood engraving surged in popularity in the 17th century as commercial production evolved to satisfy an growing wealthy middle-class clientele in Edo (present-day Tokyo), the seat of the Shōgun court. The most popular subjects initially were beautiful women and famous kabuki actors, but eventually other subjects, such as land- or sea-scapes, were explored.  The women from these Edo period prints seem to my eye to be drawn very simply with a highly stylized ideal of feminine beauty in mind, and so they look very similar to each other.  Conversely the kabuki actors are shown in character, wearing extremely comic or exaggerated expressions and dramatic costumes.  These characters were undoubtedly recognisable to the audiences of the time, but fame is fleeting, and they are now almost completely obscure to us.

Kunisada - Actor as Yura Hyogo holding a fan (c. 1852)

It was an absorbing exhibition... one relatively recent print by Hasui called Snow at Hie shrine (1931) was shown in a long fan-folded book, with an illustration of each colour as it was applied on one page, and the progressive composite print on the other... twenty-four different wood blocks needed to be carved with incredible precision so that the registration would be perfect, and there would be no bleed-through of one colour into the next.

Hasui - Snow at Hei Shrine (c. 1931)

Simon remarked how he was trying to copy a Tintin drawing as a gift for his daughters recently, and was unable to capture the feeling of it before he drew heavier black lines around the coloured section.

This technique of outlining is seen in comics everywhere, and also in early poster art of Mucha and others, undoubtedly for making the designs pop at a distance, but also to provide a tiny bit of "wiggle room" for the printer, in case the registration of each wooden block was less than perfect.

Mucha - Job cigarette paper advertisement (c. 1896)

Such was the refinement of the printmaking technique in Japan that incredibly high tolerances could be achieved, so the use of heavier lines became a aesthetic choice rather than a technical limitation, much like some new "old style" television shows are "filmed" digitally and then processed so that they look like they were actually shot on real film.

Hokusai - The Great Wave off Kanagawa from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1829–1832)

One of the reasons that Hokusai's prints were so striking is not just the drawing, or the carving, but the colours... Prussian blue was synthesised in Europe in the 18th century, but its importation into Japan coincided with Hosukai's rise to prominence, and he made good use of this novel colour.  As one walks through the exhibition - undoubtedly as the curators intended - the sudden appearance of brilliant blue colours in prints like The Great Wave off Kanagawa hits your eye with tremendous effect.

Hokusai - Red Fuji southern wind clear morning from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–32)

Darren tells me that the different roles in a printmaking studio are strictly separated.  The initial creative idea comes from the publisher, who commissions a print or series of prints.  The artist who draws or paints the design then hands it to the carver, the real star of the studio.  Then the carver gives the completed blocks to the printmaker, who applies the paints onto the block itself and prints onto the paper.  I wonder how much back-and-forth was going on between Hokusai and his carver, whose name is no longer remembered today?  Is the credit for these innovative landscape works largely due to the painter, or the carver, or the printer?  Fame is fleeting...

But it is also beautifully poetic that we can take pleasure in such fragile objects as bits of paint on paper... it's incredible to me that their colours remain so vivid and that their paper is still intact, after hundreds of years...

Canada goose from Forty-two expressions of Matthew Zadow (c. 2016)