1.

A Team Effort

Ukiyo-e is a Japanese term that translates to 'Pictures of the Floating World', with Floating World referring to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan's major cities during the Edo period (1615-1868). Inhabited by prostitutes, geisha and Kabuki actors, these were the playgrounds of the newly wealthy merchant class - Ukiyo-e works depict this hedonistic lifestyle. 

The intricacy of Ukiyo-e printmaking was centred around the collaboration of craftsmanship. One of the distinguishing characteristics in the production of Ukiyo-e was the division of labour among the painter (eshi), the sculptor (horishi) and the printer (surishi), under the supervision of a publisher (hanmoto).

Once the artist completed the design, the sculptor would cut the woodblocks and the printer would ink and press the woodblocks onto hand-made paper. The publisher then financed, promoted and distributed the works. Depending on how many colours the artist would choose for the design, there could be multiple blocks; the more colours, the more blocks.

One of the most famous artists from the movement is Hokusai, whose iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1820 - 1831) leads the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series and is thought to have produced over 5,000 original prints.

2.

The People's Art

The Ukiyo-e movement developed under the feudal military government of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Rich in history and celebrated as a uniquely Japanese art form, Ukiyo-e is inextricably linked to the rise of Japan’s middle class.

The Tokugawa Shogunate conservative regime was one of relative peace, focusing on segregating society into four classes: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. While the merchant class were deprived of political influence, they benefited from the rapidly expanding economy and the increase in disposable income provoked a desire for consumable printed material, which influenced the popularity of the woodblock prints. 

Ukiyo-e was a commercial field, and hand-colouring of prints was simply not economical on a large scale. By the 17th century, printmakers had innovated upon the centuries-old woodblock printing techniques to create colourful picture prints that could be distributed widely for popular consumption.

Katsukawa Shunshō (1726-1793) is credited with innovating conventional methods of portraying Kabuki actors. His prints were among the earliest truly realistic portrayals. In Shunshō’s work, individual actors were recognizable for the first time. Earlier actor prints focused almost exclusively on the theatrical role.

Thanks to the continuous advancement of technology bringing production costs down, by the early 19th century the price of a woodblock was the same as a bowl of noodles.

3.

Ukiyo-e’s Golden Age

A strong connection with the growing Kabuki theatre movement brought not only many buyers, but an evergreen source of subjects. Illustrations imported from the West during 1781 - 1801 deeply influenced Ukiyo-e artists, prompting them to experiment with new perspective techniques.

This period is recognised as the Golden Age of the Ukiyo-e movement, reaching a pinnacle of sophistication in the 19th century. The advancement of technology in colour printing and newly-developed methods of production supported the movement’s popularity and cultural relevance.

With growing demand for Ukiyo-e prints and rising volume of sales, artists began to specialise in particular subjects. As new highways began connecting different parts of the country making travel possible, landscapes became an increasingly popular subject.

Utagawa Hiroshige’s celebrated series Edo meisho hyakkei (One Hundred Famous Views of Edo), for instance, features scenic spots in and around Japan’s feudal capital. In 19th-century Japan, the rising middle class had the means and the time to enjoy leisure activities such as site-seeing, and scenes like this were easily recognizable.

4.

A Growing Appetite for Japanese Prints in the West

In the second half of the 19th century, the Japanese authorities opened the nation to international trade. The catalyst for this change came from the Meiji Restoration, which restored practical imperial rule to the Empire of Japan in 1866.

The change in political and social structures forced Japan to rapidly industrialise and adopt Western ideas and production methods. Part of this change prompted an increased interest in Japanese art throughout Europe and the rise of Japonism, the study of Japanese aesthetics in art and design in the West.

Unlike the standard rules of Western art, Ukiyo-e artists used unusual viewpoints, colour combinations and abrupt cropping. For many Western artists, adopting the Japanese artistic principles freed them from the rigid compositional rules typically employed by European artists. Impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassat were greatly influenced by the movement.

For the Post Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh, Japanese prints acted as a catalyst in teaching him how to look at the world from a new perspective. Moving to Paris in 1886, Van Gogh built up a sizable collection of Japanese prints, which can be viewed at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as part of their permanent collection.

The American painter James McNeill Whistler is also recognised for adopting Japanese principles of composition and spatial organization by the mid 1860s. From this period, Whistler began to focus on formalist imperatives such as flat, decorative surfaces, subtle tonal harmonies, and allusive, rather than literal, subjects. This can be seen in his work The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, in which he boldly privileges the visual elements of colour and form above subject matter.

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5.

Surimono

An intriguing sub-genre of Japanese woodblock prints are surimono. Although surimono were never mainstream, they have nevertheless been prized by collectors for generations. Translated literally as “printed things,” the word surimono refers to non-commercial, privately produced deluxe prints usually in a small, square format. Depicting still-lifes of plants, animals, objects, people and landscapes as well as comic texts, surimono were mostly created by special commission for members of poetry circles and kabuki-theater fan clubs, usually marking a special meeting or occasion. The comic text, often signed off with mysterious pseudonyms, are typically kyoka (“crazy poems”), witty verses framed in the classical waka (tanka) format with lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. The text is characterized by elaborate, erudite visual punning and complex interplays between word and image that are sometimes impenetrable even to our most erudite Japanologists today.

A hallmark of surimono are the high-quality materials and printing techniques. Delicately impressed with up to ten or more separately carved wood blocks on a thicker, surimono often employ metallic pigments and gauffrage (blind-printing without pigments) to emphasize details of a design on Japanese paper of superior quality.

6.

The Rise of the Modern Print

The cross-cultural influence of Japan on the West came full circle in the early 20th century, as artists like Ito Shinsui and Kawase Hasui catered to the arrival of Americans and Europeans in Japan. Hasui and Shinsui were recognised as two of the great artists of the Shin-hanga art movement, which prompted a resurgence of traditional Japanese art after its decline in the face of new mediums such as photography. 

Shin-hanga maintained the traditional collaborative system of Ukiyo-e; this offered an alternative to the Sōsaku-hanga movement, which stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by self-expression. 

Stifled by the established system of publishing that came with Ukiyo-e, artists began to take control of the printing and distribution process. In 1925, the artist Yoshida Hiroshi established his own printing studio combining the Ukiyo-e system with the Sōsaku-hanga principle. He is internationally recognised as one of the leading figures in the renewal of Japanese printmaking.

Over the last five centuries, the Ukiyo-e movement has continued to evolve, adapting to the tastes and techniques of the modern world while maintaining a style that encapsulates native and foreign realism.