The two and a half centuries of peace presided over by the Tokugawa shoguns of Japan, during the Edo period stimulated the growth of popular culture, and with it the art of Ukiyo floating world.
Ukiyo reflected the Buddhist credo that all is illusion, and during the Edo era it came to mean the pursuit of ephemeral pleasure. Woodblock printing enabled artists to reproduce large quantities of cheap images and triggered the mass circulation of Ukiyo-e.
Suddenly art could be enjoyed by the general population as well as the ruling elite. In fact, woodblock printing had been used to mass-produce Buddhist religious texts and simple devotional images ever since the 8th century, but it wasn't until the early 16th century that illustrated books were printed.
These ehon purely picture books, as well as books with stories and picture illustrations triggered a huge demand for all kinds of books as well as book illustration , and it was this that led to the large-scale production of Ukiyo prints. After the Meiji Restoration in , Japan went through a westernization phase bunmei-kaika during which it opened up to imports from the West, including photography , which largely superceded Ukiyo-e during the period.
Indeed, Ukiyo-e became so old-fashioned that the prints, now virtually worthless, were used as packaging materials. By then, however, large quantities of prints had been exported to Europe, where they rapidly became a source of inspiration for many modern artists , such as Van Gogh , Whistler , Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , Mary Cassatt and Toulouse-Lautrec The great Jules Cheret , the father of French poster art was also influenced by Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan. Characteristics of Ukiyo-e.
In line with its mass-appeal, Ukiyo focused on the ordinary things of life. Appreciated for its bright colour and decorativeness, its images frequently depicted a narrative, and included animals, birds and landscapes, as well as people from the lower social classes, like courtesans, sumo wrestlers and Kibuki actors.
Its impact on French painting was due to the unique characteristics of Ukiyo-e, including its exaggerated foreshortening , asymmetry of design , areas of flat unshaded colour, and imaginative cropping of figures. Famous Ukiyo-e Artists. The more realistic portrayal of women was spearheaded by Kitagawa Utamaro c. Also, familiar subjects like kabuki actors and beautiful women came to be depicted around this time, and books carrying illustrations by young ukiyo-e artists were widely circulated.
These factors helped ukiyo-e become a part of Japan's popular culture. At first ukiyo-e weren't prints but paintings made with sumi black ink ; later on, color was added, and as the number of colors increased and the paintings became more complicated, the woodblock printing technique was developed to mass-produce prints of the same design. Only a few colors were used in the early prints, but as the technique improved, ukiyo-e became more colorful and refined.
Making woodblock prints was a three-stage process: 1 painting a design with ink, 2 carving the design onto wooden blocks, and 3 applying colored ink to the blocks and pressing sheets of paper on them to print the design. There were specialists for each of these stages, and the entire process took a lot of work, but once the blocks were completed, it became much easier than before to make reproductions of the same design. The prints mass-produced in this way were circulated widely among the public, and ukiyo-e developed into a popular art form.
Utagawa Fusatane Utagawa Kunitoshi Seiko Utagawa Yoshitoyo Shibata Shinsai 2. Kawase Hasui Tsuchiya Koitsu Kasamatsu Shiro Yoshida Hiroshi Ito Shinsui Ohara Koson Fujishima Takeji Takahashi Hiroaki Hashiguchi Goyo Wada Sanzo Torii Kotondo Shotei Takahashi Koho Yoshida Toshi Shoson Ohara Hasegawa Sadanobu III Kaburagi Kiyokata Onchi Koshiro Asai Kiyoshi Natori Shunsen Yamamoto Shoun Maekawa Senpan Henmi Takashi Takehisa Yumeji Okiie Oda Kazuma Asano Takeji Tokuriki Tomikichiro Nishijima Katsuyuki Kawano Kaoru Tom Kristensen Maeda Masao Ikeda Shuzo Bakufu Ohno Kotozuka Eiichi Paul Binnie Morozumi Osamu Mitsuaki Sora Okamoto Ryusei Azechi Umetaro Kitaoka Fumio Hagiwara Hideo Maki Haku Inagaki Tomoo Mabuchi Toru Watanabe Sadao Kusaka Kenji
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