Art: Charms of a Floating World

There have been only a few private art collections in this century that have managed to define a period, a style, a mood. One of them was put together by a wealthy New Yorker named Louis Vernon Ledoux; at its peak, before he died in 1948, it contained no more than 250 Japanese wood-block prints.

But Ledoux, a scholar who made fundamental contributions to the study of the print, was obsessed with absolute quality, if so chimerical an idea can be called “absolute.” In the case of 18th century Japanese wood blocks, this quality lies in nuances of inking, registration and condition that are barely visible to the amateur. If Ledoux bought, say, a Utamaro, something had to be dropped from his chosen 250 to make room for it. Ledoux was a polisher, not a grabber; and as a result, any print that provably comes from his collection has enormous cachet for collectors of Japanese art today.

In short, Ledoux set an unsurpassable standard of taste.

When he died the prints were sold; but New York’s Japan Society has now managed to reconstitute a part of the Ledoux collection—62 items. And it would not be possible to find, in any other room in the world, a more perfect compendium of Ukiyo-e than this show.

The term Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world,” or, with a tinge of Buddhist severity, “images of the world of illusion.” Ukiyo-e, which embodied a shift away from the stony feudal pietas of Japan’s ancestral samurai culture, have a style and a subject matter that could only have taken hold in a bustling, sophisticated city like 18th century Edo (later called Tokyo). In Edo, a new class of merchants and craftsmen had risen. Like any bunch of Sony executives whooping it up in an Akasaka nightclub, the members of this bourgeoisie took their pleasures as they came and liked art to reflect them.

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So the Ukiyo, the Floating World—a little universe that stretched from the theater changeroom to the sake bar, from teahouse to whorehouse—was populated by actors, balladeers, pimps, wrestlers, inquisitive artists and, above all, every class and kind of girl. Japan now experienced a split between country virtues and big-city decadence, and its conservatives bewailed the fact, especially when the rot seemed to have invaded the Imperial Palace. “His Highness (the Emperor) sings songs called nagebushi,” complained one lord in 1718. “These are licentious tunes. It is extremely improper that a descendant of the revered Sun Goddess should do such things . . . which not even a right-thinking shopkeeper would do.”

Nevertheless, it was from this hedonistic compost that the splendors of “late” Japanese culture grew: Kabuki (theater), Bunraku (puppetry) and Ukiyo-e, which, in the hands of its masters, achieved a finesse of technique and design that, as outright decoration, was virtually unrivaled in Japanese history.

As people, little is known about the Edo printmakers.

Eishosai Choki, active in the 1780s and 1790s, did not even use his family name, and it remains unrecorded. Suzuki Harunobu (1725-70) produced most of his work—delicate images of courtesans—in the last six years of his life, leaving the preceding decades blank. The only unusual thing about Ritagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), apart from his art, was that his prints offended the government, and he was briefly imprisoned. And what we know about Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and the great landscapist Ichiryusai Hiroshige (1797-1858) would hardly fill a chapter.

But if their characters do not survive, their work does; and when the words “Japanese art” are uttered, it is still Ukiyo-e rather than the more austere forms of the Heian or Momayama eras (which roughly correspond in time to the Medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe) that we think of.

The emotional range of this art was narrow. The subjects that, in their time and place, seemed frivolous or vulgar now look both aristocratic (every courtesan a princess, swathed like a lepidopterist’s dream in patterned silk) and elaborately ceremonious. Only the faintest intimations of melancholy appear. In a print by Torii Kiyohiro, a pair of downcast lovers (actually actors) walk side by side under a half-opened umbrella. Harunobu portrays a man and a girl watching some birds on a pond. “Since ours is the enviable love of mandarin ducks,” the calligraphy remarks, “pledged with crossed wings, we should not be sad.” But the subtleties of drawing, cutting and hiking lend these prints a singular poetry. A later or poorer pull of Choki’s Two Women Seated by a Stream, 1794, would still be a striking design—the curves of drapery and languid arm set off by the strict lines of the ladies’ pipes. But the sky in Ledoux’s version contains powdered mica mixed with the ink, and this creates an exquisite atmosphere of heat and spreading moonlight.

Romantic grandeur was not, as a rule, part of the Floating World. Some late printmakers came close to it—notably Hiroshige, in sweeping landscapes like Evening Snow on Mt. Hira (circa 1835), with its jagged shadows and nervy, pecked-in trees around the icy blue eye of the lake. But if any single image can be said to summarize the spirit of Ukiyo-e, it is Harunobu’s Woman on a Verandah (circa 1767). A hot day in Edo; the colors of earth and wood are bleached to the subtlest parchment and blue-gray; the pond is still, traversed by faint, embossed curlicues of current, but there is just enough breeze to flap the ribbon of a wind bell. The courtesan on the verandah, whose neck and shoulders emerge from the rhythmic disarray of her bathrobe like some white fruit from a Tiffany vase, is an apparition—erotic but distanced by style, the right inhabitant for a perfectly clear world from which nothing more could be subtracted. ∙ Robert Hughes