Form of Japanese art (Ukiyo-e woodblock prints)

There are many forms of Japanese art, ranging from Kabuki and bunraku (puppet theater), ancient pottery, ink paintings on silk and paper to sculpture in wood and bronze. In this blog, I would not talk about every single art form instead I will discuss a form of Japanese art that influenced the European Impressionist the most, the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in more depth.

In Japan, during the Edo period (1600-1868), Ukiyo-e appeared as hanging scrolls, folding screens, book illustrations, hand-coloured albums, calendars, and woodblock prints. This style of woodblock prints later became the most dominant art form in Japan. Ukiyo-e, meaning “pictures of the floating world” focused upon contemporary life and fashion. It possessed three major themes, which were bijin (beautiful women), famous actors, and landscapes. In 1670s, Hishikawa Moronobu and other Edo artists produced a single-color works or black and white prints, hand-coloured in orange-red; their styles were like the imitations of the calligraphic characters of the ink-brushed lines. Around 1769, the first truly technique of polychrome printing, “the device enabled printers to register several colour-blocks accurately,” (T. Webb & Vollmer, 144) was developed by Suzuki Harunobu. Ukiyo-e prints were originally single-sheet prints and later on they were used for book illustrations; they also were used as posters for the kabuki theater. To produce these prints, artist, wood-block carver, printer, and publisher collaborated with each other. Artist was the one who designed, drew, and chose the color, wood-block carver engraved the wood, the printer applied colors on the wood-block, and the publisher was the one who planned and financed all the prints. Ukiyo-e prints were mass-produced; therefore, they were affordable even to people who were not able to afford original paintings. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of Ukiyo-e prints done by four-part process, involving artist, wood-block carver, printer, and publisher, were produced in Japan and were sold all over the world.

Ukiyo-e images were very different compared to the Western arts in the idea of perspective, colors, and compositions. While in Western art the idea of perspective was used very successfully, in Japanese prints there was not such a thing as illusion of perspective; the prints possessed flat space on a flat piece of paper. The colors used in ukiyo-e prints were flat, opaque, and two-dimensional; however, the colors used in the Western arts could enhance the characteristic of realism and could make the artworks to be treated in three-dimensional manner. Japanese arts also had unique compositional devices for creating diagonal planes in order to suggest the perspective; “the bottom of a picture must represent the point nearest the spectator; the higher up positions in a picture denote space further away from the viewer. Secondly, lines must converge as they approach the foreground. Lines grow wider as they recede into the flat background.” (Flynn, 13)

As Berman said in his book that “modernity equals freedom; there are no loose ends” (Berman, 25) and as Ukiyo-e pictures referred to “transient pleasures and freedom from the cares and concerns of the world” (Tokugawa gallery, 2), Ukiyo-e could be defined as part of modernity; they both share the aspect of freedom. While freedom in modernity means that we do not need to obey the rules that have already existed because we are creating and changing the world and make it our own, freedom in the images of the floating world depicts “the pleasures of life that [help] to relieve the restraints of urban Japanese life.” (Flynn, 11) Thus, the condition of Japanese life had been changed; it became a vibrant and sophisticated urban life centering the world of teashops, wine, songs, cherry blossoms, Kabuki theatre, courtesans, and brothels. (T. Webb & Vollmer, 143) Society, including artists got freedom and began to be able to depict and insert the idealized version to the prints.

These are some of the examples of the Ukiyo-e images that depict bijin (beautiful women):