Word: utamaro
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...hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e - "images of the floating world" of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well as images of Westerners relaxing in Yokohama, the port city that became the focus of Japanese contact with the West. Monet had several of Hiroshige's scenes from the classic Japanese...
More rewarding is to speculate about how art opened Monet to Japan. Printmaking is a more cumbersome and less forgiving process than painting, so Japanese artists developed a remarkable economy of expression. Utamaro, for instance, could with a mere line or two describe the course of a river or the fullness of a women's breast. Thus could Monet - in Impression, Sunrise (1873), the painting that gave Impressionism its name - conjure up a boat with a mere squiggle of the brush...
...Today show, and "My Search for a French Tickler in Japan" by young Mimi Sheraton, later the Times food critic and a food writer for Time. (I didn't read to the end to see if she found one.) "The Brothel in Art" featured works by Hogarth, Utamaro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso. The book excerpt was from the 18th century novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, which the Supreme Court would absolve from the charge of pornography on the same day it condemned Ginzburg...
...master of capturing female beauty and the obvious star of the Paris show (with 46 works) is Kitagawa Utamaro. Little is known of his origins, but in 1791 he won fame both for a series of portraits of "floating-world" beauties and for his notorious affairs with them. Utamaro was arrested in 1804 for an impolitic portrait of the shogun with his concubines, and spent 50 days in irons. He is said to have been so depressed by this public disgrace that he soon died. One of his apprentices married his widow, adopted his name and used it to produce...
...enormous impact ukiyo-e had on Western artists, especially France's own Impressionists, or even on present-day Japanese comic-strip art forms manga and anim?. And a more adventuresome exhibition might even have added some footage from ukiyo-e-inspired films like Kenji Mizoguchi's masterful 1947 biopic Utamaro and his Five Women. But that's quibbling. Better simply to enjoy the bounty of color and line, to relish the beauty of women and nature, on display in this extraordinary monument to a very special world. Better just to float...