PRINTS OF THE FLOATING WORLD

Posted by Yuka as Famous, Japan

The Japanese woodblock print:an art form whose impact was as revolutionary in Japan as Gutenberg’s printed books were in the West,and an art form that had tremendous impact on modern Western Impressionism.while the paintings of the Impressionists Monet,Van Gogh,Degas are glittering treasures of Western culture,their inspiration wasn’t Western at all.The real source of their new vision was not in France,not even in Europe,but in a country on the other side of the world,in Japan.

By the mid-nineteenth century,after a long period of isolation,Japan was once again trading with the world.In the bustling capital city of Edo,later to be known as Tokyo,artists and artisans were busy creating items for trade.In Edo most woodblock prints were things to be admired and then thrown away,like comic books or newspapers today.And so,discarded prints were sometimes used to pack ceramics for export to America and Europe.This is how Japanese woodblock prints first found their way into the oriental curiosity shops of London and Paris.

In the mid-eighteen hundreds Western art was in a crisis.The realistic schools of painting in Europe had reached sort of a dead end. The newfangled technology of the photograph produced a picture far more realistic than any artist could ever hope to paint.And so,in search of inspiration for a new direction in their art,painters would gather to marvel at,and collect,the latest Japanese imports.
The Japanese woodblock print offered a strikingly different model for what art could be.Not photographic,but stylized and impressionistic.They emphasized the surface pattern of the print rather than try to create the illusion of space beyond the flat surface of the canvas.In Europe these prints helped bring about a revolution in art.We need to investigate what was behind the creation of these prints.

“e”means picture,and “Ukiyo”floating world. What was this “floating world?”
It was a place that looked a bit like this,Gion,the geisha quarter of Kyoto.In Edo,the geisha and lower class courtesans could be found only in the Yoshiwara also called Ukiyo,the floating world.One samurai described his experiences in the floating world thus:

Living only for the moment,
gazing at the moon,the snow,
the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves,
singing songs,drinking wine,
diverting ourselves and just floating,
floating. .
Caring not a fig,
for the problems staring us in the face,
That is what we call the floating world.