Contributors Bennett Jonathan (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Included. 1st Edition. English text.; Hardcover (with dust jacket).; 27 x 37 cm.; 2 kg.; 256 pages with colour illustrations.; Used with signs of wear. The dust jacket show edge wear, scuffs and scratches on the front cover, spine and back cover, has a tear at the bottom of the front cover. The rear of the front cover show signs of have been bent at the bottom. Interior with a previous owner name and date written with a pen on title page. Remaining interior with minor signs of wear. Good condition overall.; Japanese prints today enjoy greater popularity in the West, as well as at home, than ever before. Images such as Hokusai's Great Wave or Hiroshige's Sudden Shower at Ohahi have assumed the same iconic status through wide- spread and instant recognizability as the Mona Lisa or the Laughing Cavalier. Yet these prints have been seen outside Japan for little more than a century, and they belong to a very different cultural tradition from these european paintings. Although the history of Japanese prints is usually traced from near the beginning of the Edo period (1600-1868), as early as the thirteenth century woodblock prints had been used to illustrate Buddhist texts. What differed about the prints of the seventeenth century was that they illustrated secular subjects or ukiyo, the floating world, which came to mean anything which gave pleasure in the transience of life, from the tea-house to the brothel, from sumo wrestlers to kabuki actors. Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world' were the main- stay of Japanese printmaking for 250 years. By the mid-eighteenth century hand-colouring gave way to the sophisticated full-colour printing, using up to nine printed pigments, invented by Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-1760). Harunobu and his artistic heir, Isoda Koryusai, not only transformed the technical pro- duction of prints, they initiated the use of a much wider variety of sizes and subjects Such developments set the scene for the 'Golden Age of Japanese prints, the era of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). With his prints of bijin (beautiful women) he brought printmaking to new heights of technical virtuosity and artistic sensibility. The nineteenth century which produced the most famous of Japanese prints, the landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige, also saw the impact of westernization and photography, which resulted in the opposing but complementary early twentieth-century prints of sosaku hanga and shin hanga.