Japanese Ukiyo-e
The floating world of Edo-period Japan: woodblock prints of waves, mountains, actors, and everyday life that crossed the Pacific and changed Western art forever.
Japanese Ukiyo-e: The Floating World
Ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world." The floating world refers to the entertainment district of Edo, the city we now call Tokyo, during the Edo period (1603-1868). Japan was closed to foreign trade for most of this period. The country was governed by the Tokugawa shogunate, which maintained strict social order and restricted contact with the outside world. Inside this closed society, a merchant class grew wealthy and spent its money on entertainment: kabuki theater, geisha houses, restaurants, and brothels. Ukiyo-e prints were the mass media of this world. They were woodblock prints, produced in editions of hundreds or thousands, sold for the price of a bowl of noodles. They showed actors in costume, beautiful women in kimono, wrestlers, landscapes, and scenes from daily life. They were not considered fine art in Japan. They were popular prints, the equivalent of posters. It was only after Japan opened to foreign trade in 1853 that Western collectors discovered them and recognized them as extraordinary works of art.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
Hokusai is the most famous ukiyo-e artist in the West, and "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is the most famous Japanese print in the world. It shows three long boats being swamped by a massive wave, with Mount Fuji visible in the background. The wave is not a tsunami. It is a large okinami, a type of open-ocean wave that forms in deep water. The boats are fishing boats called oshiokuri-bune, used to transport fresh fish from the ocean to the markets of Edo. The print was published around 1831 as part of the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji." The series shows Fuji from different locations, at different times of day, in different weather conditions. The concept is similar to Monet's series paintings of haystacks and the Rouen Cathedral, except that Hokusai did it fifty years earlier and in a medium that required carving a separate woodblock for each color. Hokusai produced an estimated 30,000 works over his career. He changed his name more than thirty times and moved ninety-three times. He wrote in the preface to one of his books that until he was seventy, his work did not amount to much, but that by the age of one hundred and ten he would achieve a divine state in his art. He died at eighty-nine, still painting.
The Technique
Ukiyo-e prints are made through a collaborative process. The artist draws the design on paper. A carver pastes the drawing face-down onto a block of cherry wood and carves away everything except the lines of the drawing. This becomes the key block, which prints the black outlines. Additional blocks are carved for each color. A printer inks each block and presses it onto paper in sequence, aligning each color precisely with the others. A print with five colors requires six blocks: one for the black outlines and five for the colors. The blocks must be carved with absolute precision. A misalignment of even a millimeter produces a visible gap between colors. The process demands extraordinary skill from the carver and the printer, and the artist who designs the print may never touch the wood or the paper. This is why ukiyo-e prints are considered a collaborative art form. The artist, the carver, and the printer all contribute to the final work. The artist's name is the one we remember, but the print would not exist without the craftsmen who executed it.
The Impact on Western Art
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed four American warships into Edo Bay and forced Japan to open to foreign trade. Within a few years, Japanese goods, including ukiyo-e prints, began arriving in Europe. The prints were used as packing material for ceramics and lacquerware. European artists found them in shops, unpacked them from shipments, and collected them. The impact was immediate and enormous. Van Gogh collected hundreds of Japanese prints and made oil copies of works by Hiroshige and Eisen. He wrote to his brother Theo that Japanese art was "as wise as the Greeks, as creative as the Dutch." Degas adopted the asymmetrical compositions and unusual viewpoints of ukiyo-e in his ballet paintings. Toulouse-Lautrec used the bold outlines and flat color areas of Japanese prints in his posters of Parisian cabaret performers. Whistler incorporated Japanese compositional principles into his nocturnes and portraits. This influence was called "Japonisme," a term coined by a French art critic named Philippe Burty in 1872. It was one of the most significant cross-cultural exchanges in the history of art. Japanese prints gave European painters permission to use flat color, asymmetrical composition, and everyday subjects. Without ukiyo-e, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism would not look the way they do.
Why Ukiyo-e Matters
Ukiyo-e prints are the first mass-produced art that achieved genuine artistic greatness. They were made for ordinary people, sold cheaply, and treated as disposable. Yet the best of them, by Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro, display a level of design, color sense, and compositional invention that ranks with the finest paintings of any tradition. They also represent a unique moment in cultural history: a closed society producing art that, when it finally escaped, changed the art of the rest of the world. The prints were not made for export. They were made for the people of Edo. The fact that they influenced Van Gogh, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec was an accident of history, and a lucky one.
Where to See Ukiyo-e Prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has over 2,500 Japanese prints in its collection. The Art Institute of Chicago has a significant collection, including multiple impressions of "The Great Wave." The British Museum in London holds one of the largest collections outside Japan. The Tokyo National Museum has the definitive collection of Hokusai and Hiroshige prints. The Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo rotates its ukiyo-e collection monthly, showing different prints each exhibition.
7 artworks
Peonies and Butterfly, from an untitled series of large flowers
Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1833/34)
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Plum Garden at Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"
Utagawa Hiroshige (1857)
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Storm below Mount Fuji (Sanka no haku u), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)
Katsushika Hokusai (ca. 1830–32)
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