Word: utamaros
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...Moore, demonstrating the Pre-Raphaelites' influence on him. When one realizes that these works were done by the leaders of late Victorian art, he can fully appreciate the scope and importance of Beardsley's technical accomplishment. Another artistic force in Beardsley's career, the Japanese eighteenth century print-maker, Utamaro, is likewise represented with two works. However, these subtle, lyrical works tend to point up Beardsley's limited emotional attachment. The conviction which dignifies the art of Utamaro rarely can be found in the elegant, but laconic creations of the gifted Mr. Beardsley...
...Utamaro (1753-1806) has been called one of the most refined printmakers who ever lived, and damned as a decadent who started Ukiyo-e on its downward course. (The censure may stem from the fact that he spent at least a thousand nights in the Yoshiwara, and that the girls in his designs are impossibly tall and willowy.) Actually Utamaro's work shows as much range as refinement. His first important series of prints was a book of insect studies, and his greatest depicts the wilderness upbringing of Kintaro, the Japanese Hercules. Kintaro Reaching for Chestnut is as healthy...
...true that soon after Utamaro Ukiyo-e art sharply declined. Hiroshige (1797-1858) was the last Ukiyo-e master. An Edo fireman, Hiroshige quit fire fighting at 27 to hike up and down Japan sketching. He turned his sketches into a flood of prints showing the nation's famed views, stopping places, bridges, rivers and fairs in all kinds of weather. Bales of Hiroshige's prints found their way to Europe, did as much as anything to spark modern painting. Manet, Degas, Lautrec and Van Gogh all learned from Ukiyo-e art. But after Hiroshige's death...
...popular printmakers, the Japanese have long been tops. In the 18th and 19th Centuries the genre was dominated by four masters: Kiyonga, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro. Their color prints made from wood blocks sold for a few cents each, were sometimes used to wrap tea for export. They greatly influenced such modern European painters as Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh. Now the wind blows the other way, and many Japanese prints show the influence of European art. Two of the postwar examples on the opposite page could only have been created through a meeting of East and West...
Shinsui Ito is even more of a traditionalist, for he has steadily resisted Western influences and made his reputation as a purely Nippon-Ga (Japanese-style) artist. As a portrayer of beautiful women, Shinsui is inevitably compared with Utamaro, the classic pin-up master. Although Shinsui admits that Japanese standards of feminine charm have changed ("it seems that the bust and figure predominate nowadays"), he has never wavered in his devotion to pure Oriental prettiness...