Brooklyn Museum's Exhibition of 100 Views of Edo (I)

choi

Will Heinrich, Visionary Works Offer Rare Aesthetic Devices; A 19th-century Japanese artist's vivid color woodblocks have much to teach Instagram. New York Times, July 5, 2024, at page C7 (section C on Friday is WeekendArts).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/ ... seum-woodblock.html
https://artdaily.cc/news/171874/ ... amous-Views-of-Edo-

Note:
(a) This is an exhibition review on
Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami). Brooklyn Museum, Apr 5–Aug 4, 2024.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/hiroshige-murakami
(b) "Katsushika Hokusai's '36 Views of Mount Fuji' " 富嶽三十六景
(i) Hokusai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai
(portrait; KATSU-SHIKA Hoku-sai 葛飾 北斎)
The ja.wikipedia.org for 葛飾北斎 says that his birth record was not found, so the year of birth and parents were unclear. For the latter, there were two theories: his father was either one 川村, and was adopted by a mirror maker 鏡師 named 中島伊勢 at age 4, OR his father was 中島伊勢. The table in ja.wikipedia.org indicates "出生地  日本 武蔵国葛飾郡" (presently 東京都 葛飾区), hence his art name.
(ii) In his art name 葛飾北斎: 葛, 北, 斎 have Chinese pronunciation, whereas 飾 (pronounced as shika) is found in names only (in other words, the shika is neither Chinese nor Japanese pronunciation).
(iii) The en.wikipedia.org says of Hokusai, "His childhood name was Tokitarō." The ja.wikipedia.org says there are many theories: "幼名に関しても複数の通説があり、時太郎、時次郎、時二郎、鉄蔵." (The toki is Japanese pronunciation of kanji 時.)

(c) "The exhibition begins by comparing a contemporaneous but more old-fashioned print of Kameido Tenjin Shrine with Hiroshige's view of the same locale (No. 65), and you can see at once what an aesthetic leap was taking place in Japan in the 1850s. The old-fashioned one, by Kitao Shigemasa, is dry and comprehensive, like an illustrated map; Hiroshige's, with its unusual cropping, its emphasis on the shrine’s famous wisteria flowers and moon bridge to the exclusion of its actual buildings, is at once thrillingly visceral and shimmering with self-awareness, less a depiction of the shrine’s most notable features than a distillation of their visual and emotional impact.
(i) Kameido Tenjin Shrine  亀戸 天神 社
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kameido_Tenjin_Shrine
("The original Kameido shrine, built out of wood, was destroyed during World War II when the United States Air Force conducted a firebombing campaign against Tokyo; these bombings resulted in the destruction of large parts of the city. In the years after the war, the shrine was rebuilt with more modern materials, such as concrete. The restored shrine is famous for a number of its prominent features; the shrine's grounds contain a number of ponds bridged by drum bridges, and compound also has an abundance of plum trees")
(A) In the top right, there is a photo showing the facade of the shrine.
(B) Kameido 亀戸 is the name of a neighborhood 町 in present-day 東京都 江東区.

The kame and to are Japanese pronunciations of kanji 亀 and 戸 (as in Edo 江戸, the former name of Tokyo; in both 亀戸 and 江戸, "to" is softened to do because 戸 is not situated at the beginning of a compound word), respectively. So where does the i come from. The same wikipedia says its former name was 亀井戸, whose earlier name had been 亀島. There had been an island 亀島 (which is no more likely due to landfill) whose shape looked like a turtle.
(C) This en.wipedia.org opens with Kameido Tenjin Shrine as a "Tenman-gu shrine."

In Japan there are several Tenman-gu 天満宮 shrines, all of which worship Sugawara no Michizane 菅原 道真
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugawara_no_Michizane
(845 – 903; "is today revered in Shinto as the god of learning, Tenman-Tenjin 天満天神, often shortened to Tenjin" 天神)
(ii)
(A) KITAO Shigemasa 北尾 重政 (1739 – 1820)

Kitao Shigemasa, Tenmangu Shrine at Kameido, from an untitled series of Famous Places in Edo (ca 1770). Brooklyn Museum, undated.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/102904
(Japanese title: 北尾重政 亀井戸天満宮)
(iii) 歌川 広重  名所江戸百景  No 57 亀戸天神境内
UTAGAWA Hiroshige  100 Famous Views of Edo  No 57 (English translation may vary)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Famous_Views_of_Edo
, which this NYT review identifies it as No 65. The discrepancy will be explained in another posting, on cataloging 名所江戸百景.

Also this Wikipedia URL supplies Japanese pronunciation for both 名所江戸百景 and each individual ukiyo-e (including 亀戸天神境内).

Try as I may for hours, I simply fail to find any series of ukiyo-e by 北尾重政.

-------------------------------NYT
If you want to understand the visual language of Instagram, cinema, Tintin comics, modern poster design or Vincent van Gogh, the quickest thing to do would be to ride out to the Brooklyn Museum, where, for the first time in 24 years, you can see every one of Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo” (the city now known as Tokyo).

If you’re unfamiliar with this monument of mid-19th-century Japanese woodblock art that, like Katsushika Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” profoundly influenced Western modernism and its descendants, by all means start at the beginning: How did the museum get its hands on such pristine copies? And what made Hiroshige (1797-1858) and his workshop so innovative?

An entire set of Hiroshige’s colorful depictions of his native city was bound into a book, donated to the Brooklyn Museum and left in storage for 40 years before being unbound in the 1970s. Because it was probably intended especially for such a collection, this particular set was also a kind of luxury edition, made with extra care and details, such as the use of reflective metallic dust, that ordinary consumer-grade prints, for all their intricacy, didn’t have.

The exhibition begins by comparing a contemporaneous but more old-fashioned print of Kameido Tenjin Shrine with Hiroshige’s view of the same locale (No. 65), and you can see at once what an aesthetic leap was taking place in Japan in the 1850s. The old-fashioned one, by Kitao Shigemasa, is dry and comprehensive, like an illustrated map; Hiroshige’s, with its unusual cropping, its emphasis on the shrine’s famous wisteria flowers and moon bridge to the exclusion of its actual buildings, is at once thrillingly visceral and shimmering with self-awareness, less a depiction of the shrine’s most notable features than a distillation of their visual and emotional impact.

In the main room, you’ll find 118 prints on the walls, either because “100 views” wasn’t meant literally or because brisk sales persuaded Hiroshige to issue extras. They’re arranged in seasonal order, following an index published after the artist’s death, and their numbered labels are wonderfully concrete and informative. But you don’t have to follow the order.

Every print offers a self-sufficient world, like a stage-set, and almost every one boasts some brilliant little aesthetic device that appears nowhere else. Notice the way Hiroshige’s carvers loaded branches with snow by leaving unprinted space around them, in “Bikuni Bridge in the Snow” (No. 114), and how the large sign advertising “mountain whale,” or wild boar meat, upsets your sense of where the picture ends. (Is it writing, or a drawing of writing?) Clock the razor-thin lines of rain that shoot across “Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake” (No. 58) and the wild composition of “Plum Estate, Kameido” (No. 30): Van Gogh copied them both.

It’s the prints’ flat economy, as well as their directorial focus on salient details, that live on in 20th-century Western comics and movies. Their tone is harder to keep hold of. Photographer Alex Falcón Bueno, whose recent views of Hiroshige’s neighborhoods today form a pleasurable epilogue to the show, comes close, but pop artist Takashi Murakami, whose “Japonisme Reconsidered” series, also included here, reproduces Hiroshige’s whole series on canvas, demonstrates just how much you can lose from medium to medium. In ink on paper, the careful narrowness of Hiroshige’s vistas creates a sense of magical remove; in Murakami’s acrylic and gold leaf, the same views become cloying and claustrophobic, even on a canvas 11 feet tall.

All that said, though, you can also just cut right to the heart of the matter by going directly to No. 48, “Suido Bridge and Surugadai.” It shows a large, vibrantly colored, carp-shaped windsock of the type that Japanese typically fly outdoors on Boys’ Day, May 5 (also known as Children’s Day). Crossing under its tail is the Kanda River, and behind it, after a broad green bank, the villages of Surugadai and Misaki extend back toward Mount Fuji. The narrow pole from which it hangs divides the picture asymmetrically in two; two smaller carp swim through the air on the river’s other side. A few tiny pedestrians carry umbrellas.

Depending where in the picture you look, you’ll find realism and perspective treated very differently. The plain beneath the village has depth, because it has to; Fuji is flat, because it’s an icon, and because flatness better catches its mystery. The people are simplified, the river is abstracted and the carp looks more like a real flying fish than any actual windsock could — but also, still, like a windsock. Holding it all together gracefully is Hiroshige’s serene comfort with the artifice of his medium.