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The printed images made in Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, known collectively as “pictures of the floating world”, could be bought from a local bookshop for about the price of a bowl of noodles. Collected casually, like posters or magazines, these mass-produced media started out as sexy, charming and dazzling snapshots of Tokyo high-life for the vicarious enjoyment of those who could not afford it. Manufactured by workshops of artists and artisans, they made professional works of art available to ordinary people for the first time. They’re breathtakingly beautiful, and they changed the history of art.
The first and most enduringly popular subjects for these collectible prints were famous actors from the kabuki theatreand beautiful women, typically courtesans from the brothel district of Yoshiwara. By introducing us to the denizens of the floating world, the first half of this dazzling exhibition sheds light on the dreams and desires that drive popular culture. Kunichika’s portrait of an actor in the role of a “heavenly being” is as heart-throbbing and as gender-bending as Rudolph Valentino in a bolero vest. A “fashionable beauty” caught by Eizan in the process of applying her lipstick, a delicately turned ankle visible through the gap in her marvellously rendered gown, is erotic in a way that is unavoidably (and by design) voyeuristic. You could imagine stumbling upon this half-dressed model, glimpsed through an open door, in the pages of Vogue Italia.
That these images were transgressive is integral to their charge. In a celebrated picture by Hiroshige (one of the two masters around whom this show is built), a man leaving the red light district at dawn covers his face so as not to be recognised. The more of these images you see, the more you become aware of the darkness beneath the glamour. The two young girls accompanying three sex workers in a disarmingly elegant portrait by Shunchô are serving their apprenticeship into the industry, and might have been bought by the brothel from families too impoverished to support their female children. It becomes clear that the hedonism is counterpointed, you might even say sharpened, by a despair that is kept offstage.
And then you come to Hiroshige’s heartbreaking picture of a geisha by the banks of a river at night. Her lantern-carrying attendant has been cropped out, so that we see a woman whose job is to entertain others through music and dance standing alone against the shimmering darkness. It is not only that her absorption in thought manifests a startling new psychological complexity, but that the cast of her mouth so economically expresses what the Japanese call mono no aware, or the sweet and melancholy revelation that all things must pass. We cannot know what is on her mind, but we can be sure that this deep thought has been precipitated by (and cannot be separated from) deep feeling.
This irony – that we come closest to eternal truths only when we have cause to dwell on the fleeting nature of the world – animates all great art, to which category the second half of this exhibition unquestionably belongs. It focuses on the landscapes produced in the mid-19th century by Hiroshige and the most influential of all Japanese artists, Hokusai. In it we witness a remarkable expansion in the horizons of commercial printmaking from Tokyo’s pleasure districts to the order of the cosmos. This miracle, comparable to those that electrified Elizabethan London and Renaissance Florence, cannot be attributed to a single cause, although the masterpieces here suggest several contributory factors.
The first was exposure to another way of constructing the visible world, made possible by the arrival of European art with Dutch sailors. Clearly delighted by this new box of tools, Hokusai used western perspective to compose landscapes combining dramatic depth with characteristically striking graphics in the groundbreaking Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (a series so popular that, as a blockbuster film spawns sequels, it eventually came to number 46). Not to be outdone, the younger Hiroshige responded with his magnificent Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road. This scenic tour of the journey from Tokyo to Kyoto mixes western and Asian compositional models to build the hallucinatory vistas that would later enchant the impressionists and, by way of return, transform European painting.
There is not enough space (in this article, on the internet) to adequately describe the bands of colour that Hokusai gives to the skies through pine trees and plum gardens (one literal translation of mono no aware is “the ah!-ness of things”, which is perhaps as close as we can get).
The most celebrated of all the prints featured here is, of course, the Great Wave that gives this show its title, and which will be known to anyone who has visited a university common room. The familiarity of Hokusai’s image has rendered it cosy, but this is a terrifying vision. The wave threatens to overwhelm not only the fishing boats caught in its tow but Mount Fuji itself, symbol of Japan and guarantor of divine order (as the exhibition literature points out, one plausible source of the mountain’s name is fu-shi, or “not-death”). This apocalyptic scene speaks to the anxiety of the final decades of Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, the drawing to a close of the prosperous Edo period, and the awareness that great change was coming.
Hokusai’s wave is presented next to Hiroshige’s homage or riposte, printed about 25 years later. This transcendentally harmonious composition (in which Mount Fuji stands untroubled, and time appears to have stopped) not only illustrates the differences in temperament and technique between the artists, but also introduces the most difficult to quantify factor in the transformation of woodblock prints from disposable popular media into instruments for the expansion of human consciousness. Namely the near-simultaneous emergence of two artists who were capable of accessing ideas and feelings that had previously lain beyond reach, and of making these ideas and feelings accessible to large numbers of other people. The shorthand for this is genius.
This shorthand should not disguise the fact that Hokusai and Hiroshige depended on independently gifted collaborators, or that they were products of a given time and place. But it does serve to connect them to other thinkers who have shared their preoccupation with understanding how the ever-changing appearance of things can be reconciled with the persistence of ideas and identities, and who likewise come to the conclusion that the boundary between life and death is more fluid than we are conventionally equipped to perceive. So they show it to us: the spume from the crest of Hokusai’s wave becomes the snow that falls on Mount Fuji; the flecks of foam from Hiroshige’s transform into a flock of birds flying over its summit.
