Asahina Saburo Yoshihide Wrestles with Two Crocodiles at Kotsubo Beach, Kamakura, 1849 © American Friends of the British Museum (Arthur R.Miller Collection)
Exhibition Review- Kuniyoshi: From the Arthur R. Miller collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, from March 21 2009 – June 7 2009. Admission £9.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi was a man who knew what the public wanted. Born in 1797, he entered a Japan with a thriving merchant class, where a largely literate population had the time and the money to spend enjoying themselves – whether their increasingly powerless samurai rulers liked it or not.
By the time of his death in 1861 Kuniyoshi had produced around ten thousand sheet prints, and become an acknowledged master of woodblock colour printing. This was a thriving industry, a significant form of both entertainment and communication.
As part of the ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, school, Kuniyoshi and his contemporaries produced vibrant, evocative images of the more pleasurable aspects of middle-class life in mid-nineteenth century Edo (later Tokyo).
But it was warriors – grimacing, muscled, tattooed brigands with swords in their teeth smashing objects and fighting blue-faced supernatural foes – that first got Kuniyoshi noticed. These fearsome proto-superhero characters featured in a popular series of designs based on the Chinese novel The Water Margin, which established him as a leader in the field of warrior prints.
Fishermen at Teppozu, early 1830s © American Friends of the British Museum (Arthur R.Miller Collection)
He continued to produce a wide variety warriors, inspired by 12th century Japanese civil wars and popular literature, but was a versatile artist not confined to a single theme. His relatively small quantity of landscapes are regarded as amongst some of the finest of the era.
Functioning on a different level altogether are Kuniyoshi’s “crazy pictures” – a genre of comic print he pioneered that combines wacky imagery with conceptual cleverness.
Octopus Games is an arresting example: a bizarre, cartoony and strangely contemporary print that finds frowning big-eyed pink octopi in the midst of their titular games – sumo wrestling, acrobatics and all.
Lights are kept low throughout the exhibition, so as not to disturb the delicate vegetable based dyes in the prints. The techniques that created the images, while relatively labour intensive by today’s standards, meant they could be produced on a large scale at a price much of public could afford – about the same as two bowls of Soba noodles.
Publishers would take the designs to skilled woodcutters who carefully carved them into blocks of sturdy mountain cherry tree wood. Teams of printers finished the job, getting the sheets out on to the market and selling up to 8,000 impressions.
Mitsukuni Defies the Skeleton-spectre Conjoured up by Princess Takiyasha, 1845-46 © American Friends of the British Museum (Arthur R.Miller Collection)
Because cherry tree trunks are of a fairly uniform size, so were the blocks cut vertically from their trunks. When an artist wished to expand his canvas he would have to go onto another woodblock, the standard practice being to form a triptych.
Ever the innovator, Kuniyoshi took the triptych and decided to up the drama levels by including overarching motifs that crossed all three blocks, something not previously attempted.
These colourful, lively triptychs leap out of the print thanks to their craft and sheer novelty to Western eyes, and feature dynamically realised warriors dealing with gargantuan fish, giant looming skeletons, and huge temple bells.
Eight years after Kuniyoshi’s death a young Emperor would be installed in Edo, which became Tokyo, and imperial power would be restored in Japan. In the meantime, the outgoing samurai government clung to power in the face of foreign intrusion and a rapidly expanding middle class that they could not control.
The samurai saw the burgeoning pop culture documented by the floating world artists as a threat, and began to enforce even stricter censorship than was already in place, in an attempt to quell the public thirst for pleasure and spectacle. Kuniyoshi was directly affected by these changes but refused to cease his activities and instead found clever ways round the regulations.
Hatsuhana prays under a waterfall, c. 1842 © American Friends of the British Museum (Arthur R.Miller Collection)
One room is dedicated to images of lavishly attired “Beautiful Women”. These prints - generally of courtesans, geisha, and other women of the government licensed pleasure quarters – had always proved very popular, but in 1842 new publishing laws banned such titillating imagery.
Not to be outdone, Kuniyoshi began making prints which included excerpts from respected poems, and others that focused on “famous women from history".
These images just so happened to include attractive women in a variety of situations that often revealed their red undergarments – blown by a gust of wind, caught in a rain shower, pawed by a cat – but were of course reinforcing high culture values of “loyalty, fidelity, and virtue among women.” Or so he told the censors.
Similarly he continued to cater for the public’s voyeuristic appetite for sights of the pleasure quarter by populating a drawing of the area with sparrows engaged in the business of recreation rather than the more usual, but prohibited, humans.
Sakata Kaido-maru wrestles with a giant carp, c. 1837 © American Friends of the British Museum (Arthur R.Miller Collection)
This led to another new Kuniyoshi genre: the “riddle picture”. People read these amusing yet powerful images as a satirical commentary on those in power, though of course the artist wasn’t going to say so unless he wanted to be slapped in handcuffs.
Perhaps the most well known riddle pictures, the Earth Spider triptych, is on display in the first room of the exhibition. In it, a host of menacing ghosts stream into a room where a samurai ruler and his bodyguards sit playing the board game Go.
Each ghost represents a profession afflicted by the samurai’s over-zealous censorship and control, while the reclining guards suggest the government’s declining power.
Highly detailed and evocative, filled with crowd-pleasing supernatural imagery and action, and imbued with a mischievous anti-authoritarian sense of humour, it is the perfect introduction to Kuniyoshi’s floating world.
