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Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context by Julie Nelson Davis (review)

2023; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2023.a903494

1549-4721

Kit Brooks,

Japanese History and Culture

Reviewed by: Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context by Julie Nelson Davis Kit Brooks (bio) Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context. By Julie Nelson Davis. University of Hawai'i Press, 2021. xviii, 204 pages. $30.00, paper. Ukiyo-e has a problem of overabundance. Not only can the sheer number of extant woodblock prints be overwhelming, but this high volume also [End Page 520] seems to deny any individual work the one-of-a-kind status that is usually afforded to objects of "fine art." With ukiyo-e giants like Utagawa Kunisada producing as many as 20,000 designs over the course of a career, it has been easy for some to dismiss the genre as a quantitative morass that speaks to the immediate social and commercial concerns during the period of their production rather than view ukiyo-e prints as a source of meaningful artistic achievement. There is also the issue of overfamiliarity, where audiences worldwide have become overexposed to images like Katsushika Hokusai's iconic Kanagawa oki nami ura (Under the wave off Kanagawa), which are now so ubiquitous in contemporary culture that it may be assumed no further explanation is required. If an analysis is desired, there is an enormous number of introductory books in both English and Japanese that provide a cursory overview of several hundred years of Japanese print culture, and specialist and nonspecialist websites and online image galleries add to the possibilities for exposure to ukiyo-e aesthetics. With this abundance of material and the often-repetitive accompanying commentary, the art history of ukiyo-e artists and the materials they produced—including paintings in various formats as well as commercial and privately produced prints—is surely overdue a comprehensive revision. Julie Nelson Davis's slim volume Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context is not such a text. However, the incredibly dense contents provide a rich and incisive slice through ukiyo-e history, offering immensely valuable critical prompts from which to interrogate the material and the biases of different historical approaches. Despite its self-aware historiographical lens, the structure of the book itself is conventional. The four chapters progress chronologically in a variation of the periodization found since the earliest ukiyo-e histories written in the late nineteenth century, which proposed the following categories: "Primitive" (circa 1660–1765), "Polychrome Masters" (circa 1765–90), "The Golden Age" (circa 1790–1810), and the "Decadents" (circa 1810–68). Although current terminology has moved away from problematic pejorative terms such as "primitive," and the precise number of categories and assigned dates has shifted, the essential teleological structure is generally unavoidable. However, this conceptual framework predicates a life cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decay within the given body of material. Some earlier authors expanded this concept even further, not only plotting the degenerative arc of the genre in the mid-nineteenth century, but suggestively positioning ukiyo-e itself as the phase of late-stage decay that signaled the "end" of Japanese art altogether. It is therefore no surprise that with such pervasive historical prejudices against ukiyo-e, even among its proponents, Davis begins from a somewhat defensive position and the correction of mistaken assumptions. Examples include the often-encountered dictum that prints were used by early Japanese exporters as "packing materials" for other, more valued artworks. As [End Page 521] Davis convincingly argues, this claim is based on a mistranslation of a misremembrance, and its persistence is attributable to the self-aggrandizing belief that the Western eye was able to discern value where contemporary Japan could not. Another example is the prevalent miscataloguing of works by Utagawa Hiroshige as being by "Andō" Hiroshige—a portmanteau that fails to distinguish a family name from a studio name. Such slippages are perhaps an indication that the distinction between ordinary and artistic identities that is usually granted to artists from other genres as standard is less vigilantly maintained for ukiyo-e, given its perceived proximity to social reality. These issues of ukiyo-e's recognition and identity occupy much of the book and differentiate it from many other introductory surveys. Though a reader already familiar with ukiyo-e will encounter few surprises in terms of the...