ART/HIS 318: Museum Studies

Identifies more than 2,500 designs of various formats and themes and demonstrates that Isoda Koryusai broadened the treatment of traditional print subjects. This book assesses Koryusai's significance from the perspective of consumer culture.

A historic first showing outside Japan of Itō Jakuchū's thirty-scroll series Colorful Realm of Living Beings (c. 1757-1766) at the National Gallery of Art was the occasion for this collection of twelve essays that reimagine the concepts of the artist and art-making as they were understood in early modern Japan. During the Edo period (1600-1868), peace and economic stability under the Tokugawa shogunate allowed both elite and popular arts and culture to flourish in Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The essays consider a wide range of art forms--screen paintings, scrolls, prints, illustrated books, calligraphy, ceramics, textiles--giving extended attention to Jakuchū's spectacular series as well as to works by a range of contemporary artists such as Ogata Kōrin, Nagasawa Rosetsu, Hon'ami Kōetsu, Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Katsushika Hokusai, and others.

Ukiyo-e are paintings and prints of 'the floating world' of Edo (Tokyo), which had transformed itself in just a century from a swampy village to a metropolis of about a million people. This book offers a glimpse of a vanished world that is fresh and visually rewarding to modern eyes.