OUT OF THE FLOATING WORLD

TO most Westerners, Japanese art spells woodcuts. This pains the Japanese, who are justly proud of their brush drawings, Buddhist sculptures and painted screens. But like American jazz, Japanese woodcuts succeed in expressing a popular culture precisely. The unique charm of that culture was amply displayed this week when some 350 top-rank Japanese prints went on view at Chicago's Art Institute.

The Japanese call their prints Ukiyo-e, meaning literally "pictures of the floating world." For the great period of Japanese printmaking (1650-1850), the "floating world" meant mainly the silk-swathed, sake-steeped joys of Edo's (later Tokyo's) popular theater and bawdyhouse life. The prints were produced by close cooperation between artist, wood engraver, printer and publisher, and sold for only a few cents apiece. The most famous publisher had his shop just outside the Yoshiwara (Edo's red-light quarter), offered illustrated guides and souvenirs of the quarter designed by the greatest Ukiyo-e masters.

One major Ukiyo-e artist who vastly preferred the stage to Yoshiwara subjects was Shunsho (1726-1792). His clean, bold woodcuts of single actors in self-induced throes of emotion (left) have earned him a deep if narrow niche in Japanese art. Wrote Novelist James Michener in his recent book on Ukiyo-e: "None followed his particular interpretation of art more honestly than he, and few men in any field have ever attained so close to one hundred percent of their capabilities."

Koryusai, a contemporary of Shunsho, was among the few high-born Ukiyo-e artists. The samurai generally thought printmaking and even print buying beneath their dignity. Famed for his woodcuts of Yoshiwara girls, Koryusai did equally well with more imaginative pictures of birds and animals. His Phoenix Bird (above at right) is notable for its delicacy and restraint, makes elaborate use of embossing, i.e., printing without ink, for plumage.

Utamaro (1753-1806) has been called one of the most refined printmakers who ever lived, and damned as a decadent who started Ukiyo-e on its downward course. (The censure may stem from the fact that he spent at least a thousand nights in the Yoshiwara, and that the girls in his designs are impossibly tall and willowy.) Actually Utamaro's work shows as much range as refinement. His first important series of prints was a book of insect studies, and his greatest depicts the wilderness upbringing of Kintaro, the Japanese Hercules. Kintaro Reaching for Chestnut is as healthy-minded, tender and acute a study of maternal devotion as Japanese art affords.

But it is true that soon after Utamaro Ukiyo-e art sharply declined. Hiroshige (1797-1858) was the last Ukiyo-e master. An Edo fireman, Hiroshige quit fire fighting at 27 to hike up and down Japan sketching. He turned his sketches into a flood of prints showing the nation's famed views, stopping places, bridges, rivers and fairs in all kinds of weather. Bales of Hiroshige's prints found their way to Europe, did as much as anything to spark modern painting. Manet, Degas, Lautrec and Van Gogh all learned from Ukiyo-e art. But after Hiroshige's death in 1858, the art itself descended permanently to a postcard level.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.