Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Master of Ukiyo-e School
Major Gift of Japanese Prints Received by the British Museum
Nov 17, 2008
An important gift of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) has been presented to the American Friends of the British Museum by Professor Arthur R. Miller. An American legal scholar and television commentator, he began collecting Kuniyoshi prints in the late 1970s and assembled an impressive collection of some 1800 prints.
British Museum's Website to Show Kuniyoshi Prints
In due course, the British Museum, using digital photography provided by the Art Research Centre of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, will make the collection available on its website for study and enjoyment.
Professor Arthur R. Miller's Gift
Miller's collection was deposited with the British Museum in early 2008 and he has now presented an additional 64 prints to the American Friends of the British Museum. The Friends will loan the prints to the British Museum, which already possesses a comprehensive collection of Japanese art, including 380 other pieces by the artist. The Museum is a major centre for the study, preservation and display of Japanese prints; its collection includes more than 10,000 works from the 17th Century to the present day.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the son of a silk-dyer, was originally named Yoshisaburo. He was an important master of the floating world or Ukiyo-e school of Japanese art.
Ukiyo-e (pronounced oo-kee-oh-ay) was a genre style of popular art during Japan's Edo period, (1615-1868). Translated as floating world, a word play on the Buddhist name for the earthly plane or sorrowful world, its works are marked by the portrayal of ordinary people's leisure activities.
Kuniyoshi was an active collector of European illustrations and prints. Many of his experimental cityscapes of his native city of Edo (now modern Tokyo) were drawn from unusual viewpoints and seem to have been influenced by his European collection.
Some of Kuniyoshi's powerful and imaginative prints depict famous military battles that took place in China and Japan. Fantastic elements from literature, folklore and myth were frequently incorporated into the imagery of these works on paper. Due to censorship, he sometimes placed recent historical events in a distant fictional past. The featured image is entitled Famous General Takeda Shingen, 1845-6. This colour woodblock comes from the series One Hundred Heroic Generals in Battle at Kawanakajima (Kawanakajima hyaku yûshô sen no uchi).
Kuniyoshi painted landscapes, erotica and portraits of Kabuki actors and beautiful women. Renowned for his comic prints, the artist created a new genre of crazy pictures ((kyôga), which often showed animals impersonating humans. Kuniyoshi also brought the image of the samurai to a mass audience.
Kuniyoshi on Tour
In the Spring of 2009 more than 100 items from the collection will be featured in an exhibition dedicated to Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. (Sackler Wing of Galleries from 21 March 2009 to 7 June 2009.) Future plans include a showing at New York's Japan Society, possibly in Spring 2010.
 |
