Meiji à la Mode: A Modernizing Japan, 1868–1912
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
Currently on view in the Asian Galleries, the exhibition Meiji à la Mode—which complements Taisho Chic—includes four woodblock prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), easily the most successful, talented, and prolific of Meiji print artists. Yoshitoshi stayed squarely within an ukiyo-e tradition that was quickly losing ground to photography and other technologies during the Meiji period, but his over-the-top imagination could sometimes barely be squeezed into the confines of a printed sheet. Indeed, in his print Oniwaka-maru Seeks Revenge on the Great Carp, the tail of the writhing giant fish flicks beyond the bounds of the print. The work also showcases the skill of Meiji-era carvers and printers, illustrated by the masterful carving of the fish fins and scales and the expert printing techniques that create the illusion of a plunge into swirling water from a few lines and shaded blue pigment.
The other Yoshitoshi prints in the exhibition focus on women, a favorite subject, and each work illuminates an aspect of the artist’s distinctive touch. A beauty representing the tenth month reaches delicately for a roasted yam under a canopy of hyperrealistic maple leaves. A “mistress of autumn pawlonia trees” tilts her nose into the air with a mulish expression that seems to characterize every stubborn woman who has both charmed and exasperated others. And Chikako, the heroine of an obscure narrative of filial extremity, leaps to her death into a frozen river, her sacrifice unblunted by the loveliness of the pair of herons flying upward or the sensual unraveling of her sash as she plunges downward.
Lynne Kimura
Academic Liaison
