What ukiyo-e means
Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) is usually translated as “pictures of the floating world.” The word ukiyo originally had Buddhist overtones of a fleeting, sorrowful world, but in the Edo period it took on a lighter meaning: the changing, pleasure-seeking life of the city, with its theaters, fashions and entertainment districts. Ukiyo-e artists made paintings, but the form is best known through woodblock prints, which could be produced in numbers and sold affordably.
The Edo setting
The Edo period (roughly the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century) brought long internal peace and growing cities, and the townspeople of Edo (present-day Tokyo) became a lively market for entertainment and images. The culture of the Edo townspeople supported publishers, theaters and writers, and prints were part of that world. Many were inexpensive, which is one reason they were produced for a broad public rather than only for wealthy patrons.
Subjects
Common themes include:
- Portraits of beautiful women in fashionable clothes and, in some prints, famous performers.
- Actors in kabuki theatre, sometimes shown in dramatic poses.
- Landscapes and travel scenes, including famous places and roads.
- Birds, flowers and animals.
- Historical and legendary heroes, and scenes from stories.
- Humor and everyday life.
The prints were close to what today would be posters, souvenirs and illustrations, and some served as fashion plates and advertisements as well as art.
A team effort
A woodblock print was not made by one person. Four roles are usually described.
- The publisher commissioned the work, paid for production and arranged the sale, often shaping what subjects were made.
- The artist produced the design, normally in ink on thin paper.
- The carver pasted the drawing face down on a wooden block, usually a close-grained wood such as cherry, and cut away the surface so that the lines stood in relief. The original drawing was destroyed in the process.
- The printer inked the block, laid damp paper over it and rubbed the back with a hand pad, called a baren, to transfer the image.
For color prints, separate blocks were carved for each color, with small registration marks to line up the paper each time. A print with many colors could need many blocks and many careful passes. Early prints were often black and white, with color added by hand, and then limited color printing developed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, full-color printing, often called nishiki-e or “brocade pictures,” was possible. Printers worked with water-based pigments on washi paper, which gave the colors a soft, luminous quality, and they could add effects such as blurred gradations, embossing or metallic powders.
Why it looks the way it does
Because carvers cut lines in wood, ukiyo-e favors clean outlines and flat areas of color rather than the soft blending of oil painting. Designers learned to use this constraint to their advantage, with bold shapes, patterned fabrics and dramatic composition. The influence of older painting traditions can also be seen, including the decorative sense of the Rinpa style and the compositional ideas in the Kano school, though ukiyo-e developed its own character.
Color, fading and care
Some early colors were fugitive and fade with light, which is why museums display old prints for limited periods and under low light. A faded print can differ greatly from how it looked when new. Anyone collecting or handling an old print should seek advice from a conservator, since paper is fragile.
Influence abroad
When Japan opened to wider trade in the nineteenth century, prints reached Europe and North America, and artists and collectors there became interested in them. The unusual cropping, flat color, strong lines and everyday subjects attracted attention and fed into the broader Western fashion known as Japonisme. Japonisme influence reached painters, illustrators and designers. The exact degree of each artist’s debt is debated, but the broad connection is well established.
Back in Japan, the print tradition changed too. With photography, newspapers and new printing technologies in the Meiji era, the commercial print market shifted, and later artists revived woodblock printing in new forms, such as the early twentieth-century movements that stressed the artist’s own role and landscape subjects. Today, the craft survives through workshops and artists who work in traditional methods.
Looking at a print
When you look at a print, a few questions help. Who might the audience have been? What is the subject and what does the text say, since many prints carry poems or labels? How were the colors laid down? And how does the design use the edge of the sheet? A print is both an image and the record of a team’s work.