Japanese Prints

A Japanese woodblock print was a team effort. An artist drew the design, a carver cut it into blocks of cherry wood, a printer inked and pressed each color by hand, and a publisher paid for it all and sold the result. The name on the print is the artist's, but the beauty of it belongs to all 4.

These prints are called ukiyo-e, often translated as pictures of the floating world. The phrase described the pleasure districts of Edo, now Tokyo, with their theaters, teahouses and fashionable women. Early prints showed kabuki actors and celebrated beauties, and they were sold cheaply, much like posters or magazine covers.

In the 1800s landscape became a major subject. Katsushika Hokusai's series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, made around 1830, includes The Great Wave, now one of the most recognized images in the world. Utagawa Hiroshige followed with The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, showing travelers along the great road between Edo and Kyoto in rain, snow and moonlight.

After Japan opened to Western trade in the 1850s, a new kind of print appeared. Artists in the port of Yokohama drew the foreigners who were arriving, with their strange clothes, ships and customs. At the same time Japanese prints reached Europe and caused a sensation. Artists such as Monet, Degas and Van Gogh collected them and borrowed their flat color, bold outlines and unusual viewpoints.

Look at how the pictures are built. Ukiyo-e artists often cut off a figure at the edge of the frame or put a large object right in the foreground, things Western painters of the time rarely did. Look at the color, too. Each color needed its own carved block lined up exactly with the others, and on a fine print you can see how precisely the printer matched them.