Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (review)

With Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, Julie Nelson Davis has made a significant contribution not only to Japanese art history but to Japan studies as a whole. In a well-synthesized presentation, in which each chapter builds both chronologically and thematically upon the last, she adroitly combines recent research with her own documentary finds and visual analysis to argue several provocative, intertwining theses. Davis challenges the common understanding of Utamaro and his oeuvre that still is all but unchanged from the time of the initial impact of Japanese art upon Euro-America. Utamaro, one of the most appreciated ukiyo-e artists, in fact merited the first monograph of any Japanese artist in a Western language, Edmond de Goncourt's Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (1891). According to Davis's argument, Utamaro's prints are neither a documentary reflection of their place and time as Goncourt would have it, nor are they a way to appreciate genius according to the romantic understanding of the artist; rather, they are a product of a collective construct that "marketed an 'Utamaro' point of view" (p. 19). Davis argues further that just as Utamaro's images were commodities for the market "in a process that elided both their commerciality and collaborative origins" (p. 20), the female beauty (bijin) that became the best-known Utamaro subject was a fictive illusion that promoted the Edo-period sex trade while concealing its true harshness. Utamaro proves to be the perfect instrument for such an examination. In this beautifully produced book, lavishly illustrated pages assert the aesthetic merit of this "collaborative view . . . that was described, interpreted, and packaged through and for a commercial venture" (p. 24).

The lens of Utamaro is ideal for extending arguments on the relationship between growing commercialism and the status of the artist that have been made around other figures active at the same time. The book in this way joins recent monographs such as Allen Hockley's work on Koryūsai and Adam Kern's work on Santō Kyōden.¹ Yet in my view, Davis's more ambitious argument lies in her examination of what we might call the "taxonomy function" as it relates to the Foucauldian "author function." Three of the book's five chapters are devoted to an analysis of how classifying discourses of the day, such as physiognomic analysis and the hours of the day, informed the conception of Utamaro's most famous print series. No less of a contribution to understanding the status of the Edo artist is her analysis in her final chapter that deals with the arrest of Utamaro and other illustrators in 1804 as "reining in an authorial identity that had exceeded appropriate boundaries" (p. 22).

The first chapter sets Utamaro in his times, providing essential background with an account of his initial training under Toriyama Sekien and a description of the cultural economy of the official pleasure quarters of Edo, Shin-Yoshiwara. But mainly, Davis paints a well-rounded picture of the great publisher-entrepreneur, Tsutaya Jūzaburō, to reveal how one forceful personality could remake the image of the pleasure district in the 1780s by enlisting the help of artists, poets, and writers within his circle to create a collective vision that came to stand for Edo culture as a whole. Utamaro enters the scene with initial appearances as an illustrator of popular novels and as a poet and artist contributing to kyoka (crazy verse) circle publications. The chapter culminates with Utamaro's emergence as a full-fledged star with the 1788 publication of two exquisitely produced books: Ehon mushi erami (Picture book: selected insects) and his famous erotic album, Ehon utamakuro (The poem of the pillow). Davis juxtaposes the prefaces with leaves from both of these books to show how both image and text represented Utamaro to be a master of brushwork as well as a connoisseur. Indeed, in the latter album, Utamaro is figured as a connoisseur of sex.

The second through fourth chapters contain...