Word: ukiyo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's where Japan's duality comes in. It is a nation that does not always find it easy to change, to embrace the future. In Tokyo's Ota Memorial Museum of Art this month, there is an exquisite exhibition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints displaying Japan during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, when Western habits - European music and military uniforms, crinolines - were beginning to replace the old ways. In one print, a woman in traditional kimono and lacquered hair watches wistfully as a young girl, hair flying behind her, joyfully rides a bicycle...
...there is in Japan always a nostalgia for a supposedly simpler past rather than an unpredictable future. In Tokyo's Ota Memorial Museum of Art this month there is an exquisite exhibition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Yoshu Chikanobu, displaying Japan during the Meiji period when Western habits - European music and military uniforms, guns, crinolines - were beginning to replace the old ways...
...presentation of the modern within the classical confines of ukiyo-e prints is oddly unsettling, as if the artist could not quite come to terms with the new world, and perhaps didn't want to. In one print, for example, a woman in traditional kimono and lacquered hair watches wistfully as a young girl, hair flying behind her, joyfully rides a bicycle...
...scenes of delicate natural beauty. As McMillan notes in his introduction, the great Tokugawa-era painters Hon'ami Koetsu and Ogata Korin were but a few of the visual artists drawn to the poems. The latter illustrated one of the earliest and most famous karuta sets, as the major ukiyo-e (Floating World) artists - famed for their depictions of metropolitan life in Edo Japan - would later...
...Cousines (1870), downstairs at the Marmottan, to Utagawa Toyokuni's Three Women on a Boat Lamparo Fishing (before 1825), upstairs. Monet's snowscapes, like those he did of Argenteuil, are indirect descendants of the snowy fields and mountains of Hiroshige and Hokusai. The unconventional, asymmetric "snapshot" composition favored by ukiyo-e artists became a hallmark of Impressionism: a good example is the Marmottan's La Barque (1887), in which Monet places the barque, or boat, at the edge of a mostly empty canvas. Hokusai's powerful (and famous) The Great Wave Off the Coast at Kanagawa...