The Road to Meaning
I've long been a fan of Hiroshige's Tokaido Road prints - the Corresponding Secretary General General and I went and studied them when the Asian Art Museum ran a special exhibition a few years ago. For those of you not familiar, the road from Tokyo (then called Edo) to Kyoto had 55 stations, and the artist Hiroshige made a woodblock print for each one. This is pretty cool, it really gives you a window into another world.
Here is a map of the road. He did many different editions of the series, and this page lets you view them in parallel.
But the big find tonight is this site, which digs up old photographs of many of the places Hiroshige depicted. The site's in Japanese, but just click the number of the station to see the photos. I'm sure a specialist could use these to study how Hiroshige integrated western long-distance perspective (which he learned from some Dutch paintings he'd seen) and traditional Asian perspective for the mid-range and closeups.
These also document something I'd read about elsewhere: Hiroshige wasn't averse to inventing a mountain or two if he thought the composition needed it - gotta respect that.
Oh yes, one other thing - Hiroshige worked on another road series, The Sixty Nine Stations of the Kisokaido. His collaborator was Eisen. So now our blog name really means something - "thoughts of Eisen," or "spirit of Eisen."
More on this story as it develops.
posted by Anonymous at 8:53 PM
1 Comments:
These prints are tremendously elegant, and an interesting example of the strong impact Renaissance perspective had on Japansese artists in the 19th century.
The cross fertilization was impressive - many authorities draw a direct line from the inexpensive Japanese prints (they were even used as packing material) to post-impressionism, and particularly early modern painting, as the flatness and strong color compositions began to break up Western traditions. Western artists, able to afford these prints, invariably tacked them up in their studios - but without the slightest cultural context, which was the same experience for the Japanese artists.
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