I love Japanese art and culture, but I usually don’t spend a lot of time saying so in public because that statement generally elicits presupposed knowledge about anime or J-Pop, of which I am a dilettante (the former) or almost completely ignorant (the latter). No, most of you who have been playing the home game on this blog will have probably figured out that it wouldn’t be like me to have “normal” Japanese cultural interests. A lot of my interests are, predictably, literary: the Heian era women diarists and poets; mid-century male writers like Osamu Dazai and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro; and some of the contemporary female authors like Kawakami Hiromi. But I also love Japanese visual art of almost any era, especially, again, from the Heian period (8th-12th century CE) or the golden age of ukiyo-e (浮世絵) woodblock printing (17th-19th century CE).

Ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) is generally what one, particularly in the West, thinks of when someone says “Japanese art.” Colored woodblock prints either of nature (fukeiga) or beautiful women (bijin-ga), along with several other standard themes, made in a collaborative system between artists, carvers, printers, and publishers known as hanmoto. We outside of Japan tend to only focus on the artists, like Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) or Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), but in the hanmoto system, master woodblock carvers and printers where seen as just as important, with their skills passed down through their families for generations. The opening up of Japan to trade and global culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912 CE) would see ukiyo-e exported to the West, and it would have a profound effect on fin de siècle Western art, especially among the Impressionists, post-Impressionists, and the school of Art Noveau.

However fruitful this art exchange might have been for the West, contact with Europe and the United States would ultimately lead to the decline of traditional ways like the hanmoto system in favor of western industrialism in Japan. Emperor Meiji and those in his inner circle pushed for what was perceived as modernization for the country, and this led to many adopting western dress and mechanization. Traditional arts like ukiyo-e were seen as outmoded and it became more difficult for artists to continue using these more labor-intensive techniques without broader cultural support. The shuttering and reorientation of many of the big print publishers during this time was compounded by the deaths of most of the golden age artists, which also led to a general decline in artistic quality that did nothing to bolster ukiyo-e’s popularity.

Left with fewer masters in the crafts to train the younger generations, Japanese artists and artisans were left to design a new place for themselves in a rapidly changing world. With ukiyo-e largely pushed out in Japan in favor of Western-style art (particularly yōga, oil paintings) at the start of the 20th century, there still remained a hungry market for Japanese art outside of the empire. This led to the creation of two parallel movements within the Japanese art scene to fill that commercial space: shin-hanga (新版画), or “new prints,” and sōsaku-hanga (創作版画), or “creative prints.” Shin-hanga was a revival of ukiyo-e and the hanmoto system, relying on the traditional techniques and labor divisions of the old woodblock prints, although with some artistic influences from the West, often fostered within artistic families. Conversely, sōsaku-hanga was basically western Japonisme in reverse—individual Japanese artists creating works using both western and eastern techniques and subjects, with the focus on personal self-expression.

With its emphasis on catering to Western audiences’ interests in “Old World” Japan, it was perhaps inevitable that shin-hanga would largely be eclipsed by sōsaku-hanga after World War II. It remains a niche school with a handful of dedicated artistic co-ops today, as well as a lively presence on the contemporary international art scene, but much of post-war Japanese art falls into sōsaku-hanga, which only gained in popularity during the Allied occupation and as Japan re-emerged as a major player on the global economic stage.

Anyway, what led me to talking and thinking about this is a current exhibition running at the CMOA from the museum’s collection of shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga art. CMOA has, as I understand it, a mammoth collection of Japanese prints—the culmination of large bequests from several wealthy donors, but these are mostly stored in the museum’s archives and not on permanent display. However, every few years, the staff pulls some of them out of mothballs for our enjoyment. The previous most recent exhibition I can remember was from a few years ago centered on Hiroshige (which was, of course, amazing), but this was the first time I’d seen CMOA focusing on later Japanese art in any systematic way, so that is very exciting. The collection is large enough that the museum is actually doing the exhibition in a rotation, with the first grouping (the current one) on display in the Scaife Gallery One exhibition hall until October 14th of this year, with a second display going up then until early February of next year, after which the third display will be up until mid-May 2024. This room of the Scaife Gallery isn’t the largest exhibition gallery in the museum, but it is still enough space for each rotation to show off a large number of pieces and even when I went on a random Thursday morning, there were a lot of museum goers excitedly engaged with the material.

So for the rest of the post, I just want to highlight some of the pieces that caught my eye in the summer rotation as I walked through (yes, this is going to devolve into another picture entry). I’ll talk a little about the pieces themselves, and try to show how they fit into both Japanese and non-Japanese art history. But most importantly, like as in my post about Egyptian art, maybe challenge you a little on what Japanese art is and what it looks like. Allons-y!