For the first time ever, the Rijksmuseum will be presenting 170 Japanese prints from the Elise Wessels Collection, picturing Japan's rapid modernization during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Alongside prints, the exhibition will feature kimonos and lacquerware from the Jan Dees and René van der Star Collection and posters on loan from the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Exhibition: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (24 juni t/m zondag 11 september 2016).

Introduction to all the styles and key figures of 20th century art printing in Japan

A selection of exemplary 20th-century Japanese woodblock prints from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art This volume presents more than 1,000 exemplary twentieth-century Japanese woodblock prints, from the collection of Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Taken together, the collection reflects the stylistic movements, aesthetic directions and historic changes of the past century, with particular emphasis on two significant movements: sosakuhanga (creative prints), represented by in-depth selections by Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Onchi Koshiro and Munakata Shiko; and shin-hanga (new prints), with works by Kawase Hasui and Hashiguchi Goyo. Carnegie Museum of Art also possesses several complete series of prints produced in such limited numbers that they are rarely seen today, including One Hundred Views of New Tokyo created between 1929 and 1932. In addition, an essay on the history and significance of the collection provides a brief introduction to Japanese printmaking in the twentieth century, making this illustrated guide an invaluable reference for researchers, curators, collectors and general enthusiasts of Japanese art.

Collecting Modern Japanese Prints is an authoritative guide to the contemporary Japanese art form of printmaking Authors, Mary and Norman Tolman have been involved with modern Japanese prints on every level for the past thirty years. They number among their close friends a great many contemporary Japanese printmakers. This Japanese print book contains several bodies of information. An introductory essay puts Japanese prints into historical perspective and gives a brief outline of techniques. All of the prints are in full color, in as large a format as possible, so that the art lover can savor the details of each work.

In the winter of 1886-87, during his stay in Paris, Vincent van Gogh bought 660 Japanese prints at the art gallery of Siegfried Bing. His aim was to start dealing in them, but the exhibition he organized in the café-restaurant Le Tambourin was a total failure. However, he was now able to study his collection at ease and in close-up, and he gradually became captivated by their colourful, cheerful and unusual imagery. When he left for Arles, he took some prints with him, but the core remained in Paris with his brother Theo. Although some prints were later given away, the collection did not disperse. This book reveals new analyses of the collection, now held in the Van Gogh Museum, given as a long-term loan from the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. The authors delve into its history, and the role the prints played in Van Gogh's creative output. The book is illustrated with over 100 striking highlights from the collection.

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.

Featuring over 100 unique prints, Modern Japanese Prints is a testament to the continuity of Japanese art and creativity. By far the most vitally creative group of artists working in Japan today, modern print-makers are truly international in appeal. Although they owe much of their heritage to the famous ukiyoe techniques of the past, they depart from their forebears in at least two important respects. In the first place, whereas in the ancient ukiyoe tradition a print was the joint production of three men— the artist-designer, the artisan who carved the blocks, and the printer—these modern artists perform all these functions themselves, thus satisfying their demands for individual artistic expression at every step of the creative process. Another distinguishing feature of this artistic school is that its inspiration is derived neither solely from its own Japanese past nor solely from the West. This book carefully traces the history of the modern print movement through detailed discussions of the life and work of twenty-nine of its most noteworthy and representative artists. It describes vicissitudes which the movement has undergone and the high artistic ideals which have motivated its members in spite of public apathy and the hostility of the traditionalists.