Kunisada (Bijin) ca.1860
Oban Tat-e (14 by 9.75ins)
Agemaki in layers ofd warm clothes looking out into the snowy garden where a girl is bringing in Peony.
Meigi Sanju Rokka Sen (36 Famous and Fine Courtesans)
Collection Ozgaka
Currently on show at the Kobe City Museum there is a collection of
prints from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in America and what a stunning
exhibition this is, absolutely outstanding from beginning to end, gosh the aesthetic sensibility
in creating fine art doesn’t get any better than this, it’s just wonderful.
These Edo master artists were really ahead of their time, one might suggest by the way they've used colour, composition and print textures, not only that the modernity of the image has travelled time and space probably much better that the artists themselves probably anticipated, very well.
That's the issue about this exhibition, its modernism (no wonder the French artists were stunned when they saw such artworks, its obvious in this exhibition). Aesthetic shifts within the fine arts can happen at any time within art's history and at this particular museum it regularly brings you artworks from ancient and modern histories all the time, so one has the luxury to make comparisons, this doesn't happen often throughout the world.
For example, at the Kobe Museum in recent times there was an ancient Egyptian exhibition and within this show was this stunningly sculptured cat, very modern in shape, almost as if it had been made within the last few years. This ancient Egyptians cat's aesthetic had travelled time and space so freshly, it was as though things made in the past can reveal themselves equally freshly as one gazes at it, something akin to a time travelled sensation being witnessed as it happned and within this exhibition many of those memories that can be had in the present time.
Kuniyoshi Suma Beach Kobe
Collection Ozgaka
Everything changed on 1 April, 1867, when the Exposition Universelle opened on the Champ de Mars, the massive Paris marching grounds that now lies in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It featured, for the first time, a Japanese pavilion – and its showcase of ukiyo-e prints revealed the depth of Japanese printmaking to French artists for the first time.
by
Jason Fargo
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150409-the-wave-that-swept-the-world
The way modernity resonates from these Kuniyoshi and Kunisada
prints is more than likely why French artist Claude Monet collected
Ukiyo-e for he understood the innovation of Japanese aesthetic, for example;
the focus on a singular subject matter like Kunisada's 36 Famous and
Fine Courtesans. The French
painters copied many aspects of Japanese Ukiyo-e for instance, Degas French Ballerina's or Monet's a Water Lilly that he
was so fond of it didn't matter, what mattered was that they could experiment
from what they had gleaned from collecting and studying the Japanese prints.
Who were the better artists at making aesthetic travel so freshly
through time and space is very debatable was it the Japanese Ukiyo-e Edo
Masters or was the French Impressionists? From my experience after seeing this
show by Kunisada and Kuniyoshi, the French are still behind the eight ball like much of the western world and I can’t image there will be any such
scintillating sensibility as evidenced within these artworks any time soon. So
if you’re in Kobe at the moment do go to Kobe City Museum, outstanding.
