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Ukiyo-e: 250 Anni di grafica giapponese
Loaded with color plates. Large book may incur extra shipping charges.
390 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 24, 2019
Ukiyo-e literally means "pictures of a floating world" and comprises traditional wood cut prints. This thick, coffee-table sized book contains hundreds of color prints, starting from the earliest Ukiyo-e to the latest, in the 19th century.
The editors also give a history of the art as well as brief biographies of the artists through the years. This is not a book to glance through, but to savor and learn of each artist and then contemplate the prints of the wood cut prints.
The editors also give a history of the art as well as brief biographies of the artists through the years. This is not a book to glance through, but to savor and learn of each artist and then contemplate the prints of the wood cut prints.
August 13, 2020
An accessibly written comprehensive introduction, followed by beautiful reproductions accompanied by short informative captions, just my cup of green tea
August 30, 2023
Opens with a fascinating essay. The book was originally published in Italian nearly 50 years ago, and then had a couple of reissues up to 1990. The introduction alone is worth the price of admission. The Yoshiwara, the legal red-light district of Edo that provided so much inspiration for so many superb artists was, in life, a thing far removed from its glorious appearance in famous ukiyo-e. There was a seamy, corrupt, criminal, sickening aspect to how girls were kidnapped or apprenticed into houses of prostitution, and for most of them it offered drudgery for a few short years. A handful of the most accomplished and beautiful courtesans might hope for more, not least being immortalized in the work of Utamaro, Eishi, Eisen, or even Hokusai and Kunisada in their early work. But we shouldn't let the spectacular image ukiyo-e has given us of this place and time shroud what was really happening there, as it was rarely stories with happy endings for the women.
The book deals with that honestly, straightforwardly, and then offers a solid history of how the situation developed in Japanese art as some Western techniques leaking out of Nagasaki, the only legalized port for Westerners until the mid-19th century. Hokusai and Hiroshige, those giants, get their just due, but the book plates end with Yoshitoshi and Kunichika in the latter half of the 19th century.
All that is fine and good. What mars, "Ukiyo-e: 250 Years of Japanese Art" a bit is its unctuous praise of some artists, its unnecessarily dismissive take on others, and the overly flowery prose the authors use to describe the artists' visions. It gets almost silly the way they discuss some artists, and it is preposterous and offensive to claim Kunisada/Toyokuni III made nothing of any value after his first 10 years. "Ukiyo-e" follows the approved critical consensus, but it does so too perfectly, thereby slighting the work of some artists and overpraising some others.
All in all, however, one of the best coffee table books on Ukiyo-e I've found to date. Highly recommended.
The book deals with that honestly, straightforwardly, and then offers a solid history of how the situation developed in Japanese art as some Western techniques leaking out of Nagasaki, the only legalized port for Westerners until the mid-19th century. Hokusai and Hiroshige, those giants, get their just due, but the book plates end with Yoshitoshi and Kunichika in the latter half of the 19th century.
All that is fine and good. What mars, "Ukiyo-e: 250 Years of Japanese Art" a bit is its unctuous praise of some artists, its unnecessarily dismissive take on others, and the overly flowery prose the authors use to describe the artists' visions. It gets almost silly the way they discuss some artists, and it is preposterous and offensive to claim Kunisada/Toyokuni III made nothing of any value after his first 10 years. "Ukiyo-e" follows the approved critical consensus, but it does so too perfectly, thereby slighting the work of some artists and overpraising some others.
All in all, however, one of the best coffee table books on Ukiyo-e I've found to date. Highly recommended.
June 8, 2009
I picked this up in a discount shop many years ago and held onto it as an excellent resource. It's greatest point is sheer number of images, this is a hefty tome!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews