Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (review)

In Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, Julie Nelson Davis “investigates the problem of how prints were designed to promote a particular persona for the artist known as Utamaro and how they participated in a larger discourse on gender and identity” (p. 18). Her inquiries focus on textual documents (book prefaces, rankings of print artists, and inscriptions on Utamaro's prints) and the iconography and visual qualities of his designs. She cautions against facile readings of textual references to the artist. Whether authored by Utamaro or one of his collaborators, “they function to promote ‘Utamaro’ rather than divulge him . . . these notations functioned to attract the attention of an audience interested in celebrities” (p. 19). Davis maintains that Utamaro's book and print designs functioned in a similar manner—to promote his celebrity through association with the cultural mores of the time. She argues that Utamaro was presented as someone with intimate knowledge of women in general and the Yoshiwara in particular. She also notes that many of Utamaro's designs employed a calligraphic brush line more readily associated with high art.

Davis maps her thesis over a chronological presentation of Utamaro's life and career. Chapter 1 explores Utamaro's apprenticeship with Toriyama Sekien and his relationships with Tsutaya Jūzaburō and the latter's cohort in the gesaku community during the 1780s. During this period, Utamaro illustrated several editions of humorous verse (kyōkabon), now regarded as some of the finest examples of woodblock printing from the Edo period. These publications pushed him into the limelight as a supremely talented artist possessing remarkable powers of observation and brush skills not unlike those of great past masters. Uta makura, his most highly regarded shunga album and also a product of this seminal period, endowed him with a reputation as a sophisticate (tsū) with intimate knowledge of the brothel district. These associations were critical to the construction of the Utamaro persona. Davis explores how they were reiterated and redeployed throughout the remainder of the artist's career.

Chapters 2 through 4 focus on Utamaro's bijinga designs, which Davis uses to show how his artistic persona was adjusted in response to ongoing political and social changes affecting floating-world culture. In chapter 2, she argues that single-sheet prints from the early 1790s, notably Utamaro's two physiognomy series and his depictions of Naniwaya Kita and Takashimaya Ohisa, extended his status from a floating-world tsū to a connoisseur of all women. In chapter 3, Davis claims that Utamaro's print series from the mid- to late 1790s, notably Twelve Hours in the Yoshiwara and Five Colors of Ink in the Northern Country, were responses to the relocation of unlicensed prostitutes to the Yoshiwara as a result of the Kansei reforms. The population of the quarter more than doubled, thus diluting its reputation. Davis maintains that Utamaro stepped in to reinvigorate the Yoshiwara's terms of exclusivity and, by extension, his own reputation. She uses the series The Story of the Chūshingura Parodied by Famous Beauties: A Set of Twelve Prints and New Patterns of Brocade Woven in the Utamaro Style to emphasize this later point. The lengthy inscriptions on prints of the latter series reassert Utamaro's primacy among bijinga designers and warn the public against imitations. Chapter 4 focuses primarily on the series The Parents' Moralizing Spectacles. Davis sees these designs as yet another response to the Kansei reforms, one in which Utamaro conveyed the spirit of the reforms by drawing on Confucian teachings popularized in didactic texts such as Onna daigaku. She contends that the series was also an extension of his tsū persona. As with his earlier physiognomy series, Utamaro was presented as possessing the ability see the true moral character of his subjects.

Davis admits that “Utamaro was not the first artist or author to have his reputation gilded through tactical allusions to highly valued practices and aesthetic concepts. Nor was he the first to have his image cast in the form of...