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Monday, March 19, 2012
The Open Door
William Henry Fox Talbot. English, 1800 - 1877. The Open Door,
Plate VI from The Pencil of Nature,
1843.
Salt print from a calotype negative on paper. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Perry W. Nadig in honor of their daughter, Claudia Nadig, class of 1985.This photograph, The Open Door , is the oldest in our collection. William Henry Fox Talbot was the inventor of the negative-positive photograph, and one of the earliest practitioners (some say the inventor) of photography as we know it today. This is a plate from Talbot’s series The Pencil of Nature , the first publication to explain and illustrate the scientific and practical applications of photography.
The Open Door is among the most celebrated images from The Pencil of Nature . Maybe this is because it seems less “scientific and practical” than pictorial or aesthetic. The photograph is a subtle play on interior and exterior. The open door gives us a glimpse into an old barn that then gives us a glimpse back outside through two shuttered windows. The outside of the barn is suffused with light, the interior opaque with shadow. The broom leaning in the doorway in the foreground offsets the windows in the background. The calculated asymmetry of the image is perfectly picturesque.
To explain the picture, Talbot invoked the seventeenth century Dutch painters who were popularly hailed as masters of realism in Talbot’s time. “A painter’s eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable,” he wrote.
The Open Door was hailed by the British press for its “microscopic execution that sets at naught the work of human hands.” As far as praise goes, I’m partial myself to Talbot’s mother’s description of the photograph: she called it the “soliloquy of the broom.” What would the broom be saying? Why does this picture seem so eloquent, so expressive, when all of its subjects (a broom, a barn, a hanging lantern) are mute?
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Last Silent Movie
Guest blogger Karysa Norris (Dartmouth College '12) was a participant in the 2011 Summer Institute in Art Museum Studies. She also served as the 2011 Brown SIAMS Fellow, a four-week internship in the Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints Drawings and Photographs.
White. Why. Kidney. It roasts.
What if these were the only words left of our language? In a time when it seems new words are added to the English dictionary every day thanks to the internet and the growth of international communication it’s difficult to imagine that our language could ever dwindle down to a few disjointed, trivial phrases. For the Ubykh people of Turkey, however, this is a harsh reality – their language is extinct, only to be heard in recordings saved in anthropological databases.
Language death like that of Ubykh is the focus of Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie , a compilation of recordings of extinct and endangered languages from around the world. As a student who grew up in Hawaii before studying at Dartmouth College, I am more sensitive to language death than most; the rehabilitation of the endangered Hawaiian language has been ongoing since the fifties and Dartmouth, an institution initially chartered to educate Native American youth, has a large population of Native American students dedicated to preserving their culture and language. Still, I have not inherited these native languages, so I have had a fringe awareness of the topic at best.
The first time I wandered into the Nixon gallery to see The Last Silent Movie , I wasn’t expecting very much. I rarely find digital media pieces entertaining enough to hold my attention for very long, and I was only curious about the project because I had been told that Hiller had been inspired by a recording made at Dartmouth of the Lord’s Prayer in Wampanoag, an extinct language that is currently being revived. I sat down in the darkened room and was immediately captivated by the words flashing across the screen, translating the speech playing from the speakers. As unfamiliar sounds were translated into meaningful words in front of me, over and over I found myself thinking, “What if this was all that was left of my language? What if this was the only representation left of my culture?” Even though I had an appointment to get to I couldn’t pull away, I simply had to stay and listen to these lost languages because people were speaking and someone needed to be there to hear them. When the film ended with a speaker of Comanche, a language listed as “seriously endangered,” saying “From now on we will speak Comanche forever” in her native tongue, I was overcome with a strange mixture of hope, pity, and horror, caught between wanting to believe the truth in the words and knowing their futility.
Over the next few weeks I found myself being constantly drawn back to Hiller’s project. She also produced twenty-four etchings of sound waves from a few phrases heard in the movie, and I spent a lot of time looking at the print of the South African Kulkhassi language. The sound wave of this extinct language clearly has a rhythm, but the translation is unknown. It’s easy for me to dismiss an untranslated voice as mere sound, but this print was visible, tangible proof that Kulkhassi wasn’t just random noise, it had a structure and meaning that is now lost. I thought of Hawaiian and the native languages of the students at Dartmouth, and I realized that they too could soon become just sine waves on paper.
Language death is an issue that I have been aware of for years, but it wasn’t until I experienced The Last Silent Movie that I really understood the impact it has on people. It reminded me of something that I had almost forgotten: even if you think you know all about a subject, art can reveal it to you in new ways.
Image credits: Susan Hiller. American, b. 1952. Ubykh, plate 21 from The Last Silent Movie. Jerriais, plate 10 from The Last Silent Movie. Livonian, plate 11 from The Last Silent Movie. 2007. Etching on 270 gsm Moulin de Gué (Rived de Lin) paper. Purchased with the Janet Wright Ketcham, class of 1953, Fund. Photography by Petegorsky/Gipe.
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Tuesday, March 6, 2012
At the Museum with Mary Cassatt
Edgar Degas. French, 1834 - 1917. Mary Cassat at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery,
1879-1880. Soft ground etching, etching, aquatint and drypoint printed in black on thin Japan paper. Gift of Selma Erving, class of 1927. Photography by Petegorsky/Gipe.The artists Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt shared a forty-year friendship, both emotionally turbulent and deeply sympathetic, that ended with Degas’ death in 1917. Struck by Cassatt’s paintings, Degas was moved to invite her to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877, making her the first American artist to become an established member of their group.
Degas’ dynamic portraits of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre express the admiration he felt for her. In Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery , Cassatt is caught in a moment of contemplation. Degas shows us the vitality of her attention as she looks as the art: she appears forthright and mesmerized, demanding and elegant. Unlike the woman to her left, who sits sideways on a bench and peers tentatively up at the sculpture from behind her book, Cassatt’s whole body is open to the art. And, since the perspective of the print hides her face from us, it is her body that expresses her experience in this moment—the way, say, she leans against her umbrella but also seems to float just above the ground.
This print also reminds me of the experience of going to a museum and getting side-tracked by the other visitors in a crowded gallery. Looking at people looking at art becomes part of the museum experience. In Degas’ print, the viewer is the voyeur, watching Cassatt watching; we can’t know what she’s thinking while she looks at the sculpture, but her engagement becomes a model for our own.
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Behind the Scenes with Debussy's Paris, Part II: Conservation
David Dempsey, Associate Director for Museum Services, describes the process of conserving several of our nineteenth century French posters for the exhibition Debussy's Paris: Art, Music and Sounds of the City.
The Debussy's Paris exhibition was a great opportunity to have several nineteenth century posters conserved. The posters were never meant to last very long, so they were printed on poor quality paper that is full of impurities and turned acidic and weakened over time. In the past they had been glued onto a thin linen cloth to give them some strength and to protect them. They had never been framed and were generally stored rolled up and then unfurled for classes and exhibition. This had caused a lot of wear and tear over the years.
We asked Leslie Paisley of the Willliamstown Art Conservation Center to work on conserving them and mounting them in a more formal manner. Leslie and her team began by checking to see if the inks were water soluble, which they were to some extent, so that limited our options. But by working from the back of the linen they were able to soften the glue enough to gently pull the linen off the back. Once it was completely removed they used wheat starch paste as a “poultice” (a thick gel that wet the remaining glue without causing the inks to run) to soften the remaining glue so that it could be carefully removed from the back of the posters.
The linen was replaced with Japanese tissue paper, which is very light and strong. Paste was applied to the back of the poster and the tissues placed on the back and pressed to make sure they adhered. Then the posters were mounted on larger temporary panels by stretching the Japanese tissue around the edges of the panels. They were then left to dry for two months to make sure the posters had a chance to relax and adjust to their new mounts. After drying they were transferred to custom built panels that are acid-free and very resistant to warping. New metal frames were ordered and the completed pieces are now a focal point of the exhibition.
REBECCA JOHNSTON, JENNIFER McGLINCHEY Removing the old mounting linen from the back of the poster.
LESLIE PAISLEY, REBECCA JOHNSTON applying wheat starch paste in preparation for relining
LESLIE PAISLEY, REBECCA JOHNSTON Applying wheat starch paste in preparation for relining
LESLIE PAISLEY, REBECCA JOHNSTON Smoothing wheat starch paste in preparation for relining
REBECCA JOHNSTON, JENNIFER McGLINCHEY Aligning new Japanese paper lining
LESLIE PAISLEY, REBECCA JOHNSTON Checking the alignment of the edges of tears
LESLIE PAISLEY, REBECCA JOHNSTON Replacing loose and separated edge pieces
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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Behind the Scenes with Debussy's Paris
In this post, guest blogger Kelly Holbert, SCMA Exhibition Coordinator explains the process of mounting our new exhibition, Debussy's Paris.
Debussy’s Paris: Art, Music, and Sounds of the City (February 3 – June 10, 2012) is an exhibition that celebrates the life and culture of Paris around 1900, the era of the composer Claude Debussy. Of the 60 works on view, 35 are works on paper from SCMA’s own collection.
The planning process began with the curator selecting the works of art and placing them within the thematic sections of the show (Dance ; Correspondences: Art and Music ; and Noise and Popular Music ), both conceptually in the catalogue and physically in the design of the gallery’s layout. Guest essayists and curatorial consultants also contributed to the catalogue.
The installation itself took about 3 weeks, starting with moving the gallery’s partitions and painting the color bands on the walls. Loans arrived and were unpacked by the registrar, Louise Laplante. Bill Myers and Stephanie Sullivan installed the art and worked on the lighting. David Dempsey fabricated the housings for the ambient music and listening stations, which were installed by RBH Multimedia. Last to go up were the title, wall texts, and labels.
It takes several years to plan and mount an exhibition, involving staff from Education, Membership and Marketing, and other Museum departments, so be sure to come by and enjoy a little piece of Paris in Northampton!
Bill Myers hangs an aquatint and etching by Jacques Villon
David Dempsey installs the support for the touchscreen station while Claude Debussy looks on
Adam Guerrin, from Visionsignworks, adheres the vinyl title to the wall
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Thursday, February 16, 2012
Janet Fish
Janet Fish. American, born 1938. Winsom’s Shells , 1985. Offset lithograph and screenprint printed in eleven colors on Arches Cover paper. Printed by John Hutcheson and Dwight Pogue at the Smith College Print Workshop. Gift of Janet Fish, class of 1960, through the Smith College Print Workshop. Photography by Petegorsky/Gipe.
When I began volunteering at the Cunningham Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs in August, 2011, I was totally unaware of the amazing opportunities I would be given in the coming months. As a 2011 participant in the Summer Institute in Art Museum Studies (SIAMS) at Smith College, I had been exposed to the Cunningham Center during class time and as part of the curatorial team, which conceptualized, organized, and researched the SCMA exhibition Surface Tension: Reconsidering Water as Subject , which was the culmination of the program. Given my brief exposure to the Cunningham Center, I was excited at the possibility of becoming a volunteer here after the program ended. As a person with artistic and scholarly interests, I found the prospect of being able to handle and research artworks on a daily basis incredibly invigorating. What I did not know then was that I would be given the rare and wonderful chance to act as a guest curator of an exhibition, including picking artworks and writing wall labels. I would be able to apply all that I had learned at SIAMS to my own curatorial project. While SIAMS gave me a whirlwind introduction to curatorial work, this is my first singular venture into the process.
The exhibition I have been working on is in honor of Janet Fish, one of Smith College’s most successful artist-alumnae. Fish is to be awarded a prestigious 2012 Smith College Medal, which is awarded annually to alumnae whose lives and work exemplify a devotion to a liberal arts education. Selecting the works to be displayed was the easiest part; the Museum owns three finished prints by Fish from three distinct points in her printmaking career: the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000s. The first, Cherries in Brandy (1973), is actually Fish’s first print of her professional career. The other two were both produced as part of the Smith College Print Workshop , separated by almost twenty years.
Janet Fish. American, born 1938. Cherries in Brandy
, 1973. Lithograph printed with black and gray ink with hand-colored white crayon on gray Canson wove paper. Purchased. Photography by Petegorsky/Gipe.One of these works from the Print Workshop, Winsom’s Shells (1985), was particularly fascinating to me because it is accompanied by almost twenty working proofs which were produced during the printing process. As part of the Print Workshop, Fish made the print in just a few days on the Smith College campus and students were able to drop into the studio at any time to observe and ask questions. The Museum displayed these working proofs as they were produced. They serve to dissect and illuminate Fish’s use of lithography and screenprinting, as they explicitly show the order in which she printed the 11-color work, as well as insight behind purposeful and accidental changes made along the way. To me, the existence of these working proofs is incredibly instructive and exciting. I mean, how often do you get to see the working progression of a print in a museum? Seeing these proofs as evidence of Fish’s process really helped me better understand and greatly appreciate the finished print. I hope that other viewers, artists or not, will have a similar experience.
Janet Fish. American, born 1938. Proof for Winsom’s Shells
, 1985. Offset lithograph and screenprint printed in four colors on Arches Cover paper. Printed by John Hutcheson and Dwight Pogue at the Smith College Print Workshop. Lent by the Smith College Department of Art. Photography by Julie Warchol.
Janet Fish. American, born 1938. Proof for Winsom’s Shells
, 1985. Offset lithograph and screenprint printed in eleven colors on Arches Cover paper. Printed by John Hutcheson and Dwight Pogue at the Smith College Print Workshop. Lent by the Smith College Department of Art. Photography by Julie Warchol.Janet Fish will be on view at the Museum from February 10 through June 3, 2012. Janet Fish will be awarded the Smith College Medal at the celebration of Rally Day on February 23.
Read the Boston Globe review of the exhibition here .
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Monday, February 6, 2012
Melancholia I
Guest blogger Michele Wick is a research associate in the Psychology Department at Smith College.
Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I, on display in the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Genius and Fame , intrigues me. As a psychologist researching the complex relationship between creativity and emotional wellbeing, I know some worry that equating mood and artistry could distract attention from an artist’s work. However, if we retreat to 1514, the year Dürer created his iconic engraving, people who suffered the pains of depression had more pressing image problems.
At the time, health was considered to be a balance between four vital fluids or humors - blood, yellow and black bile, and phlegm. The humors affected both body and mind and were the basis for individual health and personality. Melancholia was the result of excess black bile. According to art historian Erwin Panofsky, the afflicted were: “Thin and swarthy…‘awkward, miserly, spiteful, greedy, malicious, cowardly, faithless, irreverent, and drowsy.’” Add ‘surly, sad, forgetful, lazy, and sluggish,’ and it becomes clear that melancholics did not offer much for society to respect. Worst of all, physicians believed that insanity was caused by extreme excess of black bile. If you were melancholic, you were partway there.
Melancholia I excites, in part, because Dürer presented a new perspective on melancholia that challenged the prevailing stereotype. Typical images of the day included a farmer asleep by his plow or a housewife dozing at her distaff, but Durer gives us a woman with wings, signifying her superiority. She represents the intellectual power of applied geometry with the capacity to brood. Her energy, says Panofsky, “is paralyzed not by sleep but by thought.” Her struggle, and Dürer’s too, is the painful dialectic between theory and practice. Life seems futile when you have ideas you cannot actualize or problems you do not have the skills to solve.
Dürer’s Melancholia I was renowned across the European continent for more than three centuries. I wonder how its popularity might have influenced, even in subtle ways, people’s opinions about those who suffer from the symptoms of mood disorder. How an image on paper affects an image in flesh.
Albrecht Dürer. German, 1471–1528. Melancolia I , 1514. Engraving on paper. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Lent by Priscilla Joyce Engle. Photograph by Laura Weston. 1974.L1.4
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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Will Barnet's The Golden Frame
Will Barnet. American, 1911–. Study for The Golden Frame
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1990-1995. Carbon on synthetic vellum. Gift of Will Barnet and Elena Barnet. SC 2008:53-10. Photograph by Petegorsky/Gipe. It’s easy to see why drawing is so important to Will Barnet’s paintings. His layered textures are balanced by spare yet expressive lines that delineate the firm, almost geometric forms that make up his figures. Born in 1911 and still painting at 100, Barnet received a classical art training at the Boston Museum School, then under the direction of the painter Philip Hale.
It took Barnet two years to paint The Golden Frame , which was preceded by twelve compositional studies. This group portrait of the artist and his siblings is part of a series of paintings called My Father’s House . This body of work was conceived in 1990 when Barnet, the youngest of his siblings by 11 years, returned to his family home in Beverly to visit his sister Eva who was living in the family home alone following the death of their sister Jeanette. During his visit he observed Eva, in the throes of a fever, wandering through the house imagining the presence of their departed family members. An evocation of how memory and history surround us, Barnet’s paintings are both highly personal, yet also very inclusive. We may not know all the characters of his story, but we are given enough information to parse it all out, as well as become emotionally involved in the scene.
The surround of The Golden Frame is based on a mirror which hung in the hallway of Barnet’s family home; in it we see the reflections of the artist, his elder brother Benjamin, and his two sisters. It is clear that he struggled with the composition for some time—in each drawing the figures are arranged differently, their positioning, posture, and gazes changing, sometimes quite markedly. A group portrait is not just a collection of likenesses, but of relationships between figures, and the success of the picture hinges on the accurate representation of such qualities.
Will Barnet. American, 1911–. Studies for The Golden Frame
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1990-1995. Carbon on synthetic vellum. Gift of Will Barnet and Elena Barnet. SC 2008:53-18. Photograph by Petegorsky/Gipe.In the final painting, Barnet’s solution seems effortless and fitting; the artist, the tallest member of the group is in back with his sketchpad, surrounded by his brother and sisters (both living and dead). Looking straight ahead at the viewer, the artist’s gaze is calm, probing, and frank; recording both present circumstances and memories from the past.
Will Barnet. American, 1911–. The Golden Frame
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1990-1995. Oil on canvas. Gift of Will Barnet and Elena Barnet. SC 2008:53-1. Photograph by Petegorsky/Gipe.Comments
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Käthe Kollwitz: Darkness and Light
Käthe Kollwitz. Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait),
1934. Lithograph on buff wove paper. Purchased.Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) was a German printmaker and sculptor. The first woman admitted to the academy of arts, Kollwitz flourished during the Weimar Republic. Her fortunes changed after Hitler came into power and she petitioned against the Nazis. She lost her studio and was forced to leave the academy. Kollwitz’s commitment to social justice permeates her graphic work, particularly in her portrayals of the working class, the poor, and the effects of war.
Kollwitz’s prints are haunting, unsettling and provocative, but even as they show scenes of suffering, pain, death and loss, they are not unrelentingly grim. Empathy suffuses Kollwitz’s work, as though art were a way of identifying faces among the masses, drawing them out of anonymity. The sense of figures drawn out of darkness is also a compositional idea in Kollwitz’s prints. Often shrouded in dark, shapeless clothes, her figures come to life in their faces and hands, both communicators of feeling and experience. Take a look at this print called Battlefield , from the series The Peasant’s War:
Käthe Kollwitz. Schlachtfeld (Battlefield), Plate VI from series Bauernkrieg (The Peasants' War),
1907. Etching, mechanical grain, aquatint and engraving on paper. Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen (Bernice M. McIlhenny, class of 1925).In the dark of night, a woman holding a lamp searches for a face she recognizes among the dead. (Given Kollwitz’s frequent depictions of mothers and children, I always imagine this woman is looking for her son.) Notice the dramatic illumination of her hand and the man’s face. I love the expressive use of shadow, light and tone in this print that allows Kollwitz to picture this interaction between the living and the dead, the hand and the face. Kollwitz’s art is, in a sense, a recovery of the dead: like the woman seeking her son, she shines her lamp on the obscure, the victimized and the suffering. This act of bringing light to darkness is, I think, both an act of empathy and of political engagement. She lends dignity to the sufferers and gravitas to those willing to face difficult truths. Her lithograph Call of Death suggests that facing death, even facing one’s own death, can be a moment of connection.
Käthe Kollwitz. Ruf des Todes (Call of Death),
1934-1935. Lithograph printed in black ink on cream-colored wove paper. Gift of Mary B. Mace, class of 1935, in memory of Jere Abbott.Comments
Howard Shubert
Käthe Kollwitz: Darkness and Light
Thanks for a thoughtful piece. I wonder whether the upraised hand with the barely extended index finger of the figure in Ruf des Todes is a quotation from Michelangelo's Creation scene at the Sistine Chapel, essentially a moment of connection, but one of origination rather than call to death.
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Thursday, January 19, 2012
Pictures of the Floating World
Kitagawa Utamaro. Japanese, 1753 – 1806. A Man and a Woman
, 1803. Woodcut printed in color on paper. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James Barker (Margaret Clark Rankin, class of 1906).Uikyo-e is a form of woodblock printmaking that flourished between in Japan the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The word Uikyo-e means “pictures of the floating world.” Traditionally, these prints depict a world of sumptuous colors, elegant women, and dazzling theatrical illusions.
Toyukuni III (Utagawa Kunisada). Woman Standing in Bow of Boat, Winter
, 1820s. Woodcut printed in color on paper. Gift of Helen D. La Monte, class of 1895.The “floating world” of Ukiyo-e refers to the pleasure quarters of Edo. Edo, a modest fishing village, became the capital of Japan under the warlord government called the Tokugawa shogunate that held power from 1603 until 1868. The village was transformed into a vibrant metropolis known for its entertainment culture, featuring music, Kabuki and puppet theater, geishas, and woodblock prints.
Edo flourished. Within a little over a century of this new government rule, it became the largest city in the world. When the Meiji Restoration abolished the shogunate in 1868, Edo was renamed Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.” Thus, Japanese printmaking and its tradition of beauty and elegance is tied up in the history and rise of the city we now know as Tokyo. Ukiyo-e is an art of ethereal and ephemeral beauty and pleasure, but it is also very much an urban tradition – both a product of this urban expansion and its visual record.
The Japanese print scholar Sandy Kita points out that Ukiyo-e presents a paradox in its name and its history. “Ukiyo ” means “floating world,” and “-e” means “pictures, paintings or illustrations.” But the word ukiyo , as a common noun, precedes the pleasure quarters of Tokugawa Japan by seven or eight centuries, carrying a rather different definition: “the present” or “here and now.” Therefore, Ukiyo-e refers simultaneously to pictures of the floating world and pictures of the here and now, pictures of the illusory and pictures of the real. This print of fireworks over the water nicely encompasses this blend of the ephemerality of the here and now and the almost fantastical beauty of reality:
Ichiryusai Hiroshige. Japanese, 1797 – 1858. Fireworks at Ryogoku, No. 98
from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
.This second translation of Ukiyo-e as “the here and now” might help explain the preponderance of landscape prints in the Ukiyo-e tradition, particularly those by nineteenth century artists Ando Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. These artists are most famous for their series’ of Edo landscapes – for example, Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido and Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji – which exhibit a documentary style that seems far removed from the Floating World of fantasy and illusion.
These landscape prints are more realism than fancy. Occasionally, however, they combine realism with legend or myth, as in this print of the New Year’s Eve Foxfires from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo :
Hiroshige, Ando. Japanese, 1979 – 1859. New Year's Eve Foxfires at Nettle Tree, Oji, No. 118,
from the series One Hundred Famous Views of
Edo
, late 1830s. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James Barker (Margaret Clark Rankin, class of 1908).The centrality of Ukiyo-e in Japanese culture began to wane in the 1850s, when Japan opened up trade with the west and photography, a newly minted technology, gained currency in Japan. At the same time, artists like Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas were becoming fascinated by Japanese prints, incorporating the aesthetic and sensibility of ukiyo-e into their paintings and prints. It is easy to imagine how ukiyo-e, with its view of reality as ephemeral and subjective, appealed to these Impressionist artists.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. French, 1864 – 1901. L’anglais Warner au Moulin Rouge
, ca. 1892. Brush and spatter lithograph in olive green, aubergine, blue, red-orange, yellow and black on originally buff, now brown, Van Gelder laid paper. Gift of Thomas A. Kelly. Comments
Anders Rikardson
The floating world and Hiroshige
Amanda is writing about Hiroshige's realism.
This is most obvious in his landscapes with active "active" weather images. Snow, rain, mist and wind.
Please see:
<a href="http://www.japaneseprintappraisal.com/2007/05/utagawa-hiroshige-1797-1858-snow-scen.html">Snow, Kinryuzan Temple in Akasaka</a>