In mid-Nineteenth Century Edo, then the largest city in the world, a proclamation went out from the office of the North City Magistrate that nearly put publishers of popular woodblock prints out of business. It forbade the production of single-sheet prints of kabuki actors, prostitutes and geishas, framing them as detrimental to public morals. For one popular woodblock artist, the decree seemed to have been a catalyst for creativity, growth and popularity. His name was Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
Working in the shadow of the repressive Tokugawa shogunate, Kuniyoshi’s art pushed the limits of censorship with veiled subtexts that were all too clear to his fans. Like the best of populist art, its universal themes have held up over time and just last year drew record crowds to London’s Royal Academy of the Arts.
That dynamic show, “Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur B. Miller Collection,” has crossed the pond and is open at the Japan Society Gallery through June 13.
Organized in cooperation with collector Arthur R. Miller and the British Museum, the exhibition of more than 130 color woodblock prints is the first major exhibition in more than 30 years of Kuniyoshi’s works. In a unique twist, it brings to light the artist’s influence on the present day graphic story forms manga and anime.
A master storyteller of larger-than-life historic tales filled with tattooed warriors and mind-shattering swordplay, Kuniyoshi was among the four leading artists of the ukiyo-e school. The others were Katsuhika Hokusan and Utagawa Hiroshigi, known for their articulate landscapes, and Utagawa Kunisada, who is known for prints of kabuki actors and beautiful women.
The specialization was as much a result of the artists’ own inclinations as a reaction to the competition among publishers for niche markets. Hundreds of thousands of ukiyo-e prints were sold to townspeople, the lowest †and largest †social ranking group in the official Confucian hierarchy of samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants.
Whether portraying the fate of doomed samurai, lampooning his rulers, making his point with animals impersonating humans or depicting the byways of Edo, Kuniyoshi’s works can elicit pathos, humor and quiet contemplation. He took inspiration from the natural world, the political climate and a broad collection of foreign and Western works. Pressing the limits of art, not to mention censorship, Kuniyoshi ultimately led the art of the Floating World toward the foreign and the modern.
The son of a dyer, Kuniyoshi (1797‱861) taught himself to draw at a young age. By 11, his work had come to the attention of Utagawa Toyokuni and at 15, he was accepted into Toyokuni’s studio.
As early as 1814, he had completed a set of illustrations for a novel in gokan (combined volume) format. After that, Kuniyoshi seems to have experimented for nearly a decade before finding his own distinctive style. Although works from this period are relatively scarce, two notable triptychs, “The Ghost of Taira no Tomomori” and “Roben Waterfall, Oyama Sekison Temple,” exist. The latter features what many experts believe to be a self-portrait of a heavily tattooed Kuniyoshi bathing among a crowd of pilgrims beneath the sacred waterfall. This marked the beginning of a style that would mature in the mid-Nineteenth Century at the height of the shogunate’s repressive Tenpo reforms.
Around 1827‱830, Kuniyoshi had his first commercial success with a series popularly known as Suikoden, or “One of the 108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin.” The muscular, often splendidly tattooed heroes are Chinese outlaw warriors who battle with other brigands and the imperial forces, in accordance with their own moral code. Among them are three female warriors, including at least one who can simultaneously wield multiple swords.
He soon became known for recreating stirring episodes from history. The civil wars of 1180‸5 between the Minomoto and Taira clans, the reunification wars of the late Sixteenth Century and the vendetta of 47 loyal samurai from the Ako fief in 1701 and 1703 were among his favorite sources. The latter two were politically sensitive, so Kuniyoshi generally set the exploits in more ancient times.
In the 1840s, the artist expanded from the single-sheet print to triptychs, thus introducing a major artistic innovation. Among the first of these was the “Skelton Spectre Conjured up by Princess Takiyasha.” In the print, an animated skeleton looms from the darkness, dominating two panels of the triptych and menacing the warrior Mitsukuni. In another, “Oniwakamaru About to Kill a Giant Red Carp,” a monstrous carp glides just below the water surface across three panels. On the bank, a determined child, the soon-to-be warrior monk Benkei, awaits. With nuances as commanding as the large red fish, one can see the hilt of the child’s sword wrapped with a rope to keep it from slipping from his immature hands.
Not all prints of the ukiyo-e school were as G-rated. “Spring pictures” exalted nudity and coupling. Collectors with softer inclinations bought prints of beautiful women, although, by Kuniyoshi’s time, these were usually “professional” women. During the early years of Kuniyoshi’s career, his images of women were unadventurous, the preserve of his senior rivals, Kunisada and Eisen. This changed and, again, the change came with the new publishing regulations that banned images of courtesans and geisha.
To comply with the order “to compose in accordance with [the values of] loyalty and fidelity, to promote virtue among children and women,” Kuniyoshi produced Biographies of Wise Women and Virtuous Wives.
One such heroine was Hatsuhana, who prayed for 100 days under a freezing waterfall to cure her husband’s illness. Even so, Kuniyoshi was summoned to the city magistrate’s office for an official hand-slapping. Circumventing the law once again, Kuniyoshi produced “Pride of Edo: Comparison of Famous Products.” Although named after the neighborhoods of Edo and the products that could be purchased in each, the focus of the work is clearly on the women associated with them.
One of the most telling compositions of Kuniyoshi’s ability to tell a tale within the confines of the censor is “Women Diving for Abalone at Ise.” According to Timothy Clark, a leading authority on Japanese art and author of the 300-page exhibit catalog, Kuniyoshi: From the Arthur B. Miller Collection , the women wear modestly short jackets. In real life, these shell divers worked with their breasts uncovered, a fact that formed an important part of their mystique.
For the most part, Kuniyoshi left the painting of landscapes to Hokusai and Hiroshige. Yet some of his 1830 prints, which incorporate European elements and eccentric subjects, provide a viewpoint that puts them among the greatest of all Japanese landscapes prints.
Although cityscapes had long been a staple of Floating World woodblock prints, they became very popular in the 1780s, when travel at all levels of society increased. Kuniyoshi produced two series of Edo that seem to have been issued in parallel with Hiroshige’s. The difference is that Kuniyoshi’s are infused with European influences †low horizons, ragged clouds, pronounced foreground motifs, unusual subjects, occasional shadows and three-dimensional modeling of trees and rocks. At least one, “The Night Attack, Act Eleven of Treasury Loyal Retainers,” was based on Jan Nieuhor’s illustration, a view of Batavia.
Other European influences came from the Dutch school of the Akita fief, which had pioneered the European style in Japan, and from Aodo Denzen’s copperplate prints of landscapes. Among the most international in appearance is “Dong Yong Bids Farewell to the Heavenly Weaver.” While the text on the print describes how Dong Yong was so poor he had to sell himself into service to pay for his father’s funeral, the print portrays his encounter with a beautiful woman as he makes his way back to his master’s house. Like an angel, she is ascendant in the sky, arms stretched upward, leaves in one hand.
One school of thought says she is based on the frontispiece in de Lairesse’s “Groot Schilderboek” and the objects she holds are palm leaves. Additionally, the gateway in the print appears to be Chinese, as do the hairstyles and robes of some of the figures. According to Timothy Clark’s notations, one figure in the work was adapted from a depiction of an unclothed native Brazilian woman in Nieuhoff’s “Gedenkwaerdige zee-en lantreize.”
In 1843, there came a ban on pictures of children dancing in imitation of theatrical scenes. Publishers were desperately in need of other subjects. Kuniyoshi responded by developing a novel, sophisticated kind of “crazy picture” that satirized the times. The images soon entered the official books as “riddle pictures.” In “The Earth Spider Conjures up Demons at the Mansion of Minamoto Raiko,” viewers could clearly equate each demon in the battle with a social group or profession that was suffering under the reforms. Yet, interpretations were so varied that they deflected censorship. Ironically, the publisher was so frightened by the design’s success that he withdrew it voluntarily.
By 1846, restrictions had begun to relax and kabuki prints with actor likenesses began to reappear. Kuniyoshi met the new laws with “Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Ishikawa Goemon” in a series titled “Sibling Pictures: Comparison of Thirty Selected Trees and Flowers.” This print stands alone in the series as portraying a recognizable face.
In 1853, Kuniyoshi produced “Miracle of Masterpieces by Floating-World Matabe.” “Likeness pictures” of kabuki actors on the figures made it notoriously popular. At the time, the dreaded ban on reproducing kabuki actors had been lifted and City Prosecutions records that the block-ready drawing was approved by the censors on the sixth day of the sixth month. Sales exploded; 1,600 prints were printed daily. But there other considerations to take into account, such as the squadron of four battleships that steamed in Uraga Bay under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry.
There are those who say that Kuniyoshi would have had time to design a print in response to the Americans’ arrival and present it to the censors, but that is open to question. The more likely key factor in the print’s success was the death of the 12th shogun, Tokugawa Leyoshi, whose rule had been dominated by the Tenpo reforms. As they had ten years earlier with the “Earth Spider” triptych, people began reading into Kuniyoshi’s image what they wanted. The kan on the sleeve of the young falconer, for example, could easily have stood for the soon-to-be-appointed 13th shogun. The Wisteria Maiden could have been seen as Lady Fujinoe, a powerful figure in the shogun’s harem. And the monkey and the catfish could have been the Americans.
Hidden meanings, having been incorporated into Kuniyoshi’s images for so long, made it impossible to know who really was represented in the image.
Despite the controversy that plagued his career, Kuniyoshi was more successful in his encounters with authorities than other artists. Perhaps it was the spontaneity of his work, his willingness to adapt to the times and make the times adapt to him that saved his skin time and time again. Or perhaps it was his fertile imagination and command of the graphic idiom that made him untouchable. Either way, the works by Kuniyoshi from the Arthur B. Miller Collection still resonate with archetypes as recognizable today as they were in the Floating World.
“Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi From the Arthur B. Miller Collection” will be accompanied by lectures for adults and drawing introductions for children. The Japan Society Gallery is at 333 East 47th Street. For information, 212-715-1258 or www.japansociety.org .
