Picturing the Floating World

Picturing the Floating World PDF Author: Julie Nelson Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824889339
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Today we think of ukiyo-e—“the pictures of the floating world”—as masterpieces of Japanese art, highly prized throughout the world. Yet it is often said that ukiyo-e were little appreciated in their own time and were even used as packing material for ceramics. In Picturing the Floating World, Julie Nelson Davis debunks this myth and demonstrates that ukiyo-e was thoroughly appreciated as a field of artistic production, worthy of connoisseurship and canonization by its contemporaries. Putting these images back into their dynamic context, she shows how consumers, critics, and makers produced and sold, appraised and collected, and described and recorded ukiyo-e. She recovers this multilayered world of pictures in which some were made for a commercial market, backed by savvy entrepreneurs looking for new ways to make a profit, while others were produced for private coteries and high-ranking connoisseurs seeking to enrich their cultural capital. The book opens with an analysis of period documents to establish the terms of appraisal brought to ukiyo-e in late eighteenth-century Japan, mapping the evolution of the genre from a century earlier and the development of its typologies and the creation of a canon of makers—both of which have defined the field ever since. Organized around divisions of major technological and aesthetic developments, the book reveals how artistic practice and commercial enterprise were intertwined throughout ukiyo-e’s history, from its earliest imagery through the twentieth century. The depiction of particular subjects in and for the floating world of urban Edo and the process of negotiating this within the larger field of publishing are examined to further ground ukiyo-e as material culture, as commodities in a mercantile economy. Picturing the Floating World offers a new approach: a critical yet accessible analysis of the genre as it was developed in its social, cultural, and political milieu. The book introduces students, collectors, and enthusiasts to ukiyo-e as a genre under construction in its own time while contributing to our understanding of early modern visual production.

Picturing the Floating World

Picturing the Floating World PDF Author: Julie Nelson Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824889339
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today we think of ukiyo-e—“the pictures of the floating world”—as masterpieces of Japanese art, highly prized throughout the world. Yet it is often said that ukiyo-e were little appreciated in their own time and were even used as packing material for ceramics. In Picturing the Floating World, Julie Nelson Davis debunks this myth and demonstrates that ukiyo-e was thoroughly appreciated as a field of artistic production, worthy of connoisseurship and canonization by its contemporaries. Putting these images back into their dynamic context, she shows how consumers, critics, and makers produced and sold, appraised and collected, and described and recorded ukiyo-e. She recovers this multilayered world of pictures in which some were made for a commercial market, backed by savvy entrepreneurs looking for new ways to make a profit, while others were produced for private coteries and high-ranking connoisseurs seeking to enrich their cultural capital. The book opens with an analysis of period documents to establish the terms of appraisal brought to ukiyo-e in late eighteenth-century Japan, mapping the evolution of the genre from a century earlier and the development of its typologies and the creation of a canon of makers—both of which have defined the field ever since. Organized around divisions of major technological and aesthetic developments, the book reveals how artistic practice and commercial enterprise were intertwined throughout ukiyo-e’s history, from its earliest imagery through the twentieth century. The depiction of particular subjects in and for the floating world of urban Edo and the process of negotiating this within the larger field of publishing are examined to further ground ukiyo-e as material culture, as commodities in a mercantile economy. Picturing the Floating World offers a new approach: a critical yet accessible analysis of the genre as it was developed in its social, cultural, and political milieu. The book introduces students, collectors, and enthusiasts to ukiyo-e as a genre under construction in its own time while contributing to our understanding of early modern visual production.

Images from the Floating World

Images from the Floating World PDF Author: Richard Lane
Publisher: Konecky & Konecky
ISBN: 9781568524818
Category : Color prints, Japanese
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
U-kiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock print tradition was one of the highpoints of classical Japanese civilization. Written by one of the foremost experts on Japanese prints, Images from the Floating World provides the definitive history of this wonderfully graceful and evocative artistic tradition. U-kiyo-e gives an incomparable record of Japanese life during the heyday of the geisha and the samurai. Included is a complete Dictionary of Ukiyo-e and hundreds of illustrations including over 40 in color.

An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World PDF Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307829065
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

Sex and the Floating World

Sex and the Floating World PDF Author: Timon Screech
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861890306
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book offers an entirely new assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga. Recent changes in Japanese law have at last enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many picture books have since appeared in Japan. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender or power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserve a place in the official history of Japanese art, have dominated, and the question of the use of these images has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in its proper historical contexts of culture and creativity. Sex and the Floating World opens up for us the strange world of sexual fantasy in the Edo culture of eighteenth-century Japan, and investigates the tensions in class and gender of those who made - and made use of - shunga.

Painting the Floating World

Painting the Floating World PDF Author: Janice Katz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300236913
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From the 17th through the 19th century, artists in Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo) captured the metropolitan amusements of the floating world (ukiyo in Japanese) through depictions of subjects such as the beautiful women of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and performers of the kabuki theater. In contrast to ukiyo-e prints by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, which were widely circulated, ukiyo-e paintings were specially commissioned, unique objects that displayed the maker’s technical skill and individual artistic sensibility. Featuring more than 150 works from the celebrated Weston Collection, the most comprehensive of its kind in private hands and published here for the first time in English, this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume addresses the genre of ukiyo-e painting in all its complexity. Individual essays explore topics such as shunga (erotica), mitate-e (images that parody or transform a well-known story or legend), and poetic inscriptions, revealing the crucial role that ukiyo-e painting played in a sophisticated urban culture.

Pictures of the Floating World

Pictures of the Floating World PDF Author: Amy Lowell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description


The Floating World

The Floating World PDF Author: C. Morgan Babst
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616207639
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
“Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdoré family . . . in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm’s emotional impact on those who lived through it.” —People In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city. As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic—the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself. This mystery is at the center of Babst’s haunting and profound novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans’s most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed. The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told—one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.

Utamaro

Utamaro PDF Author: 小林忠
Publisher: Kodansha
ISBN: 9784770027306
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This volume presents the work of Utamaro, the master ukiyo-e portraitist of women. It includes colour reproductions from Ten Studies of Female Physiognomy' and 'Great Love Themes of Classical Poetry'. Who was the man behind the pseudonym 'Utamaro'? We know that he was one of the greatest artists of eighteenth-century Japan, and that he was a master portraitist of women in the woodblock-print tradition known as ukiyo-e. But as for the man himself, we know almost nothing. The little there is-gleaned from contemporary books, miscellaneous writings, temple registers-is'

The Japanese Print

The Japanese Print PDF Author: Hugo Munsterberg
Publisher: Weatherhill, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This straightforwardly written and highly informative book is designed as an introductory history and guide to Japanese prints for the student and the beginning collector. Not limited to "ukiyo-e", it also discusses medieval Buddhist prints and the prints of the modern era, from the Mieiji period to the present. Thus such modern luminaries as Onchi, Hiratsuka, and Munakata are presented alongside the Edo master printmakers Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. A major virtue of the book is the attention it gives to the aesthetics of the prints and to the lives of the printmakers themselves. Illustrated with 14 prints in full color and 86 in black and white, it also offers a thoroughly useful chapter on the collection and care of Japanse prints, a glossary, and a valuable selected bibliography. -- From publisher's description.

The Dawn of the Floating World, 1650-1765

The Dawn of the Floating World, 1650-1765 PDF Author: Timothy Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903973004
Category : Color prints, Japanese
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
This ambitious and groundbreaking publication accompanies an exhibition of highlights from the early ukiyo-e holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Much of Boston's renowned collection of 'pictures of the floating world' (ukiyo-e), an incomparable record of Japanese life, was acquired from the Boston physician William Sturgis Bigelow in the early twentieth century. Subject to a loan restriction since 1928, most of this collection has never before been seen outside Boston. Many of the works have been newly photographed for this catalogue and are hitherto unpublished in this format. Illustrated throughout in colour, this book also features essays, artist biographies and exhaustive catalogue entries by leading scholars examining the stylistic nuances of early masters such as Hishikawa Moronobu and Okumura Masanobu; the techniques used by early ukiyo-e artists; and the history of the Boston collection, 'the finest collection of oriental art under one roof in the world'.