Magic in Japan – The Body of the People By toshidama In this case not necessarily the physical body – I’m thinking here of the cultural body and how that relates to the people. When we look at the extraordinary corpus of Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth century we are struck firstly by its hermeticism. This [...]
Kuniyoshi to Yoshitoshi – Reviving the Warrior Class By toshidama Cultures turn to mythologies for reassurance – myths define us like daydreams, they show us how we might be. In England, (where we were recently reminded of all those knights in armour at Prime Minister Thatcher’s funeral) pageant remains the drag anchor to change: nostalgia, the [...]
David Bowie… Pop Goes Kabuki By toshidama Ukiyo-e artists have used kabuki, (traditional Japanese theatre) as subject matter for their woodblock prints more or less since its inception in the seventeenth century. David Bowie started experimenting with kabuki for his stage shows in 1973. By the time of his Aladdin Sane tour he was wearing actual kabuki costumes [...]
Japanese Shunga Prints – Art or Pornography? By toshidama It is the fashion, especially among connoisseurs, to make distinctions between erotica and pornography. However, it seems to me disingenuous to describe some images as pornographic and others as erotic when the distinction is only contextual or at least subjective. In the field of Japanese art, shunga is the [...]
Women and the Floating World By toshidama I guess it is to be both anticipated and regretted that the women of Japan who were once the great writers and poets and priestesses, not to say robbers and warriors of their culture, should have been reduced by the middle of the nineteenth century to the status of ornament [...]
Japanese Snow Myths By toshidama For those interested in Japanese prints it will be obvious that snow is a major subject for both landscapists and narrative artists. The most desirable Hiroshige landscapes tend to be his haunting snow scenes – these great and seemingly effortless depictions of white-out conditions… the great heavy flakes that punctuate the night [...]
There – Not There – Woodblock Prints and the Work of Paul Morrison By toshidama In ukiyo-e, as in all prints produced from blocks, there is little margin for hesitation – no grey area for the artist to prevaricate. In relief printing at its most basic, there is only the presence of a mark (black or [...]
The Naked and the Nude By toshidama Sir Kenneth Clark opens his book The Nude, with the following phrase: The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. [...]
Portraits of Sansho – Ichikawa Danjuro IX By toshidama Toshidama Gallery is currently showing some very fine Meiji woodblock prints amongst which are some extraordinary portraits of the Meiji era kabuki star Ichikawa Danjuro IX (1838 – 1903). Danjuro, probably more than any other actor, typifies our contemporary image of kabuki. There were of course many forerunners both in his [...]
Japanese Prints In Context – Kunisada Warriors By toshidama It’s a fact of history that it is not always the person that first conceived something that is remembered so much as the person who made it famous. In ukiyo-e, this is particularly true of one of the nineteenth century’s most lasting and noticeable genres – the musha-e or warrior [...]
Imaginary Journeys – Hiroshige’s Tokaido Road By toshidama There are two recent publications celebrating Hiroshige’s views of Japan: Nancy Gaffield’s poem cycle Tokaido Road (C B Editions £7.99) and Taschen’s Hiroshige – 100 Famous Views of Edo. The former is an imaginary journey along the famous Tokaido highway; one poem for each of the 53 stations, [...]
Boys and Girls: Gender, Kabuki and Japanese Prints By toshidama Japanese prints can be confusing territory for those seeking certainty. Artists of the ukiyo-e revelled in “look and compare” pictures or mitate-e as it is called. Borrowing from the traditions of poetry, mitate-e pictures play ironically with the knowingness of the audience, substituting contemporary actors for historical characters or [...]
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