Page 371 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

popular art of Japanese woodblock prints primarily with the landscapes of Katsushika Hokusai and
Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige, but in fact these are a late phenomena in Edo print culture. Hokusai's Fuji
series and Hiroshige's Tókaidó series represent the print boom of the early 18305.
Most ukiyoe, or "pictures of the floating world," created by genre artists of the late seventeenth
through late nineteenth centuries, dealt with the daily life and amusements of city dwellers and featured
courtesan districts and kabuki theater. Since the overwhelming majority of ukiyoe prints portrayed
actors or courtesans and their clientele, artists of this school necessarily had to grapple with depictions
of the human figure, not a strength of artists from the traditional Kano, Tosa, and Rinpa schools. With a
few notable exceptions, the realistic depiction of the human figure has never been the first priority of

370 the Japanese painter or sculptor:

Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.... It is unreal, and yet it is not
unreal; it is real, and yet it is not real. Entertainment lies between the two.... If one makes an exact copy of a living
being, even if it happened to be Yang Kuei-fei [who was renowned for her beauty], one will become disgusted with it.
Thus, if when one paints an image or carves it of wood, there are, in the name of artistic license, some stylized parts
in a work otherwise resembling the real form; this is, after all, what people love in art While bearing resemblance
to the original, it should have stylization; this makes it art, and is what delights men's minds. 1

As the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653 -1724) suggests in this passage on the mimetic art
of puppet drama, perhaps artists' avoidance of realistic representation was intentional. Admittedly, the
usual materials and formats of early Japanese pictorial art — paintings or woodblock prints created
with water-soluble pigments — did not lend themselves to a strong tradition of verisimilitude, as did oil
painting, which is not to say watercolors or woodcuts could not have been used to reach that end (see
cat. 77). When western-style chiaroscuro and perspective that can create convincing veristic effects
came to be known, they were not embraced (see cat. 186).
A survey of Japanese genre painting and prints indeed reveals that the representation of an
individual's expression is rarely a priority. Taken to the extreme, faces become masks without wrinkles
or blemishes; bodies become stiff garments with carefully articulated folds but with no sense of an
underlying corporeality. Emotions are generic, human shapes stereotyped. We might then ask, at what
price did Japanese artists forgo verisimilitude of bodily description, the portrayal of individual character,
and psychological profundity — all of which weigh so heavily in our evaluation of premodern European
art? They eschewed these qualities to gain the freedom to produce pictures with expressive outlines of

calligraphic vigor, dynamic patterning and design, and coloristic brilliance whose power to move viewers
remains strong even today.
Yet even if we accept that artists of the ukiyoe tradition, in particular, did not pursue as a pri-
mary aesthetic goal the naturalistic representation of the human figure — more specifically, the face —
it would be shortsighted to disregard the ingenuity displayed by artists of this school in creating emo-
tionally evocative images of men and women at play. We may conclude that faces function merely as
masks conveying generic emotions such as joy, sadness, sexual allure, disinterestedness — the list can
be as varied as the range of human emotions. Then these masklike faces are enlivened and transformed
by a complex aesthetic syntax of hairstyles, garments, body poses, and symbolic personal accessories
or accoutrements of leisure. Needless to say, every tradition of figurai representation has its own set of
conventions and historically constructed visual vocabulary, but the ukiyoe tradition is distinguished