What Is Ukiyo-e? Japanese Woodblock Prints and the Floating World

The name means pictures of the floating world, and the phrase carries a deliberate pun. The original Buddhist term described the sorrowful transience of existence; the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, respelled it with a different character to mean floating in the sense of drifting pleasurably, and used it for the licensed entertainment districts of the growing cities. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo became one of the largest cities in the world with over a million people, and a merchant class grew wealthy while being placed near the bottom of the official social order and barred from displaying status in conventional ways. That class was the market. What it wanted was pictures of what it enjoyed: the courtesans of the Yoshiwara district, the actors of the kabuki theatre, sumo wrestlers, teahouses, and later famous views, ghost stories and scenes from history.

A print was a manufactured product of a four-way collaboration, and the artist whose name appears did only the first step:

• •The publisher commissioned the design, financed the production, judged the market and owned the blocks, and was effectively the producer
• •The artist drew the design in ink on thin paper, working to a commercial brief
• •The block cutter pasted that drawing face down onto a cherry wood block and carved away everything that was not a line, destroying the original drawing in the process, then cut a separate block for each colour
• •The printer applied water-based pigment with a brush, laid the paper on and rubbed the back with a pad called a baren, once for every block, aligning each impression by notches cut into the wood
• •A full-colour print might need ten or more blocks and impressions, and techniques included gradated washes applied by hand to the block, blind embossing, and the application of mica or metallic dust

The tradition began in the late seventeenth century with single-sheet black-line prints, sometimes coloured by hand, and the key technical advance came in 1765, when Suzuki Harunobu and his collaborators perfected full-colour printing with multiple registered blocks, producing what were called brocade pictures. The classic subjects were portraits of beautiful women and of actors, and the great specialists include Utamaro, whose close-up studies of women's faces set the standard, and the mysterious Sharaku, who produced around 140 unsparing actor portraits in ten months in 1794 and then vanished without anyone establishing who he was. Landscape arrived late and made the form internationally famous: Hokusai published his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in the early 1830s when he was over seventy, and Hiroshige followed with his series on the stations of the Tokaido road. Government censorship was constant, with sumptuary edicts periodically banning depictions of courtesans, actors or current events, and publishers responding with coded substitutions.

Japan's ports reopened in the 1850s and prints reached Europe in quantity, sometimes as wrapping for ceramics, and they arrived exactly when European painting was looking for a way out of academic convention. What painters took was not subject matter but structure: flat areas of unmodulated colour, strong outlines, an absence of modelled shadow, asymmetric compositions with the subject pushed off centre, radical cropping in which a figure is cut by the frame, high or unusual viewpoints, and a treatment of empty space as active rather than unfinished. Monet collected over two hundred prints and hung them in his house at Giverny; Van Gogh copied Hiroshige directly in oil and wrote that all his work was founded to some extent on Japanese art; Degas took the cropping, Toulouse-Lautrec the poster flatness, Whistler the compositional balance, and Mary Cassatt made a series of colour prints in direct imitation. The enthusiasm was named Japonisme, and it fed into art nouveau and the poster design of the 1890s.

The irony is complete: in Japan these were commercial goods of low prestige, made in editions of hundreds or thousands, and the prestigious art of the period was ink painting and calligraphy in the Chinese-derived tradition. Serious Japanese collectors of the nineteenth century did not collect them, which is one reason so many of the best surviving impressions are in Western museums, in Boston, London and Paris. Value depends on things a casual buyer does not see: an early impression from fresh blocks against a late one from worn ones, the state of the colours, since many pigments faded badly in light and a print now showing a pale grey sky may have had a strong blue one, and later reprints struck from original blocks or recut ones, which are common and are not forgeries so much as reissues. The tradition declined after Japan opened, as photography and mechanical printing took its commercial functions, and survives now in revival movements and in an unbroken line of technique carried by a small number of block cutters and printers.

Woodblock prints of the Edo period were cheap commercial products made for the merchant class of a city of a million people, depicting the entertainment districts, actors, courtesans and later famous landscapes, and produced by a team of publisher, artist, block cutter and printer with one block per colour. Full-colour printing arrived in 1765, Hokusai and Hiroshige brought landscape to it in the 1830s, and when the prints reached Europe their flat colour, cropping and off-centre composition reshaped Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting.