Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860 (review)

Ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world," are sometimes mistakenly conceived of as woodblock prints when historically the phenomenon also embraced related styles in painting and mass-produced book illustration. The present volume, an exhibition catalogue with loosely related essays, brings these other media into the fold. This is a welcome contribution, especially to the extent to which Japanese art history has been a field that, long focused on the minutiae of connoisseurship, has tended to miss the forest for the trees.

What might be termed this gestalt approach of the catalogue follows that of the exhibition itself, which displayed approximately 150 paintings and illustrated books as well as prints. Held at the Asia Society Museum in early 2008, this major exhibition commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Art Society of America (formerly the Ukiyo-e Society of America), which publishes Impressions, one of the leading journals of Japanese art history. Lenders to the exhibition numbered some 30 named individuals, other anonymous collectors, and many institutions, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New York Public Library; Seattle Art Museum; and the Asia Society of New York. Drawing support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the catalogue boasts essays by some of the heavy hitters in Japanese art history and the first-rate editing of exhibition organizers Julia Meech, who also edits Impressions, and Jane Oliver.

The gestalt approach is laudable, to be sure, though its originality is perhaps inevitably overstated in the opening fanfare. Melissa Chu (in one of two forewords) boasts that the project "presents a new perspective" and claims that by focusing "not only on woodblock prints, but also on paintings and illustrated books, an expanded view is offered of the visual culture of Edo Japan" (p. 8). In fact, such pioneering scholarship began taking place during the penultimate decades of the last millennium. Moreover, the term "visual culture," slipped in here and elsewhere, implies that the present volume will move ukiyo-e studies into the relatively new field of visual culture studies, when in fact most of the essays revert to the old paradigms of a more conservative brand of Japanese art history. Granted, art history is one iteration of visual culture studies, perhaps even the most significant one. Even so, the present volume, while admirably building on recent ukiyo-e studies, may not go far enough (its hyperbole aside) in pursuing its own stated aims.

One such central aim is to demonstrate the elite patronage of ukiyo-e painting. In the lead-off essay that serves as an introduction to and overview of the following essays, "A Mirror of the Floating World," Donald Jenkins paints in broad strokes a history of ukiyo-e scholarship in English, arguing persuasively that the study of ukiyo-e must be extended from prints to paintings and book illustrations, and that the very concept of the floating world needs to move beyond popular culture to elite culture:

It used to be maintained . . . that ukiyo-e was a popular art, patronized almost exclusively by the urban middle classes and frowned upon by the shogunate, the daimyo and the upper classes generally. To a degree this was true. But as scholars became more familiar with the kyōka ("mad verse") movement . . . they discovered the extent to which minor officials from the shogunate and habitués of the floating world regularly socialized together in poetry clubs.

(pp. 19-20)

One wonders if in demonstrating "the importance of elite patronage in the course of ukiyo-e history" (p. 21), ukiyo-e prints are not relegated in the process to an even lower status than the one...