Reading Japanese Prints

The visual arts present a paradox. We look at the very picture created by an artist (or, in this case, a team of artists and craftsmen) and observed by viewers centuries ago; but ignorance of the artist’s and viewer’s culture often prevents us from noticing the visual clues that gave the pictures full meaning in their land of origin.

On the most basic level, Japanese prints usually contain a text that identifies the artist and the ostensible subject. They might also include a verse or explanation that adds another unexpected dimension to the print. Who, at first glance, would associate Hiroshige’s striking fan print of chrysanthemums (acc. no. 34.305) with an ancient Chinese myth?

Important cultural information was often coded in the costumes, hairstyles, and gestures of figures in the prints. Prominent crests on their robes identified kabuki actors (acc. no. 20.1056) and certain patterns were associated with particular roles. An abundance of large hairpins would identify a woman in an early 19th-century print as a high-ranking courtesan. Other meanings were often concealed, and many prints were visual puzzles that challenged their viewers’ ingenuity and imagination.

The Tokaido was a highway that connected the city of Edo (where all the prints in this exhibition were produced) and the ancient capital of Kyoto. Pictures of activities and places along this road were very popular in the 19th century, and artists quickly created stereotypes for some of the stations. Hiroshige, in the early 1830s, created the standard representation of a procession setting out from Nihonbashi Bridge. By the middle of the century, artists often played against these stereotypes. Kunisada, for example, shows a child holding a doll of a figure in one of these processions that Hiroshige obliquely matches with an inset view of the pilings of the bridge.

The meaning of some of the clues in these prints has been lost. There is no way to know why Usuyukihime is carrying toys attached to sheaves of rice in Kiyomitsu’s print (acc. no. 20.1073) because the libretto for this performance no longer exists. Autumn is the season in which rice is harvested, but it is impossible to tell whether the love interest in the poem was the woman in the picture, her lover, the handsome young actor himself, or all three. Japanese poetry allows a great deal of ambiguity and suggestion, and this esthetic was wholeheartedly adopted by many artists who designed prints.

Each work in this exhibition contains more than meets the eye, and in the time between the creation of the earliest and latest prints on view here, the richness of allusion and coding became more and more complicated. This increasing intellectual complexity is precisely mirrored in the greater saturation of color and richness of pattern and design in the mid-19th-century Japanese prints.