Collecting Japanese Prints

by Eisen Ikeda

ca. 1840

Sifting Through the Remains

If words were enough to capture the beauty and fascination - the sheer glittering magic - of Japanese prints, books would suffice.

But just as reading about the smell of the sea or of a deep pine forest cannot stir our senses as can the real thing, so must one become intimate with an actual print to experience it to the full.

Standing at a respectful distance from a print on a museum wall, or examining one in a gallery under the watchful eye of the owner, is simply not the same experience as sitting with a print, alone or with a like-minded friend, in the quiet of one's own room. The eyes are permitted to take a leisurely and soothing journey across the softly textured surface of the paper, to bathe in the warm colors and swirl of the lines, to penetrate into the scene these colors and lines form, without distraction.

We can imagine the designer's initial inspiration, the artisans who gave it such wonderful form, the lineage of previous owners who handled the work and marveled in much the same way we do at its qualities.

How fortunate we are that such an experience is still possible, that these talented artists and skilled artisans of Tokugawa Japan not only created an art within the reach of everyone, but left it in such numbers that this experience is yet available to us today.

No words can capture the experience of a fine ukiyo-e print, but words can guide us to deeper appreciation, fuller journeys in the world of the print.

It is my hope in writing these notes that I might be able to provide such service, to some degree, for every reader: to stimulate even the most experienced collectors to view their prints anew, and to assist the beginning collector with fundamental advice on building a collection for appreciation.

A Guide to Ukiyo-e by a Collector for Collectors

I envision these words as a humble supplement to the many fine works on ukiyo-e written by experts in the last half-century, references to which, with the collector in mind, will be given in subsequent sections.

In fact, I make a pointed effort to avoid making a repetition of the excellent information readily available in these works of art history.

What I aim to provide, rather, is something new: a guide to ukiyo-e by a collector for collectors, one that treats ukiyo-e not as museum objects for explanation, but as treasures that can live with us, thrilling our senses, expanding our imaginations and enriching our lives.

For I strongly believe that the Japanese print is best appreciated by being collected, and that the practice of collecting is much more than acquisition; it is selection, rejection, discrimination and redirection.

It is, in fact, an adventure that carries one into another time and space, a differently constructed land, culture and human mind, while helping to define what is essential about one's self.

And in this it is fundamentally different from the museum viewing experience. Therefore, instead of lists of artists and dates, seals and signatures, biographies of artists whose work has long since passed out of the general market, these essays will discuss the artists whose work is still readily available to the collector, and how to go about collecting it.

My approach is unabashedly subjective, and the reader is welcomed to disagree on most points, but hopefully this very disagreement will allow you to define yourself and your purposes for collecting with a new clarity.

Glorious Remains

As the title of these notes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, suggests, the general impression given in most art books is that the "best" examples of ukiyo-e have long since passed from the marketplace, leaving collectors with the notion that they are sifting through what has been left behind.

But what glorious remains! In fact, the departure of so many rare prints to museums in the past century, as well as the steadily increasing rarity of prints by the artists traditionally dubbed "masters", has brought to the fore different styles of art and new masters, with an aesthetic language only beginning to be recognized and appreciated.

Certainly this language is bolder, more dramatic, colorful and even violent, than the traditional canon of fine ukiyo-e.

But canons of taste are not formed purely, divested of personal interests and social influences, and clearly the time is ripe to re-evaluate what had formerly been dismissed out of hand, and to give it an opportunity to assert its value.

Collecting the Kuni's and Yoshi's

I am speaking, of course, primarily about the artists of the nineteenth century, "the kuni's and yoshi's" as James Michener once disparaged them, the artists whose work was once considered common and not worthy of collection, and so is still readily available to the collector today.

Yet these artists constitute but one of the many poorly explored niches in the field of Japanese prints, and I will touch on several others here.

The fundamental conviction that drives these notes is the belief that there is great value, both personal and communal, in forming a discriminating collection of Japanese prints, and that this experience is still as available to us in the twenty-first century as it was to the great collectors of the past.

The earliest and rarest pieces may have largely become unavailable or gone beyond the purchasing power of the average collector, and yet a great variety remains for us to explore, and within it are yet many unacknowledged treasures and visual delights.

For contrary to the beliefs that drove early writers on Japanese prints, a work does not have to be either early or rare to provide a culturally profound or aesthetically stimulating experience.

If we can develop the senses to see on our own, to listen to the aesthetic codes of the works before us rather than applying to them the codes of an earlier generation of artists, we can pass beyond the stale critique of the nineteenth century print and begin to evaluate these works according to a different set of rules - their own.

And one of the ways in which we can accomplish this is as collectors. Would we have Kuniyoshi, the now acknowledged master, for example, without Bidwell and Robinson? Would the Japanese book have reached its current status without Holloway and Hillier? Or indeed, would we even have a canon of Japanese prints, a set of acknowledged masters and masterpieces, without the discrimination of early collectors, who set these standards for excellence according to their particular values and desires?

One of the curiosities of ukiyo-e, in comparison with other art forms, is that its critics are most often also collectors - and this should not surprise us. For collecting is one expression of discrimination, one means of defining the art form for oneself, and one way of learning to see.

The Art of the Collection

Collectors have been accused of various things over the years - Freud spoke of "anal retention" and Marx of "fetish value" - and at its worst, collecting can be an ugly, petty, even destructive bourgeois competitive sport. But that is not the kind of collecting I wish to focus on here. Rather, I wish to look at the "art of the collection", the practice of gathering pieces together in a meaningful way, in order to make a statement about them and one's own assessment of their value - and more than that, one's particular view of the world.

For the sophisticated collection is not only a way of defining an interpretation of an art, of singling out what is valuable and special, and placing these pieces in connection with one another to underline this point, but of defining one's self, one's own tastes, interests and way of looking. Collecting, in short, is one way of meaningfully interacting with the symbols of culture and the forms of our world - and this is the very definition of an art.

It is my wish that my words here can stimulate fellow collectors to examine their reasons for what they do: to consider the kind of work they collect, to clarify the nature of their attraction to this work, and to define the direction of their collecting in a meaningful way.

The Magic of the Japanese Print

For that rectangle of pigmented paper that constitutes the Japanese print is truly a special plane, a charged field in which incredibly refined technical mastery, a highly developed aesthetic sense and a complex world of history and culture intersect.

Its survival, through years of human neglect, and natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and fires, is in itself a small miracle. But the true magic of the Japanese print lies in its ability to shape and expand our vision, to take us out of the workaday world in which we habitually reside, and transport us to a brightly lit place of the imagination, which is yet strangely connected with the real beauty inherent in human life.

For some, the colors of early prints, with their rare, soft hues utterly unlike anything seen today, are fuel enough to cast away the weight of the day and allow the finer feelings to fly. For others, it is engagement with the heroes of Japanese history and myth, or with those icons of the Edo Period (1600-1868), the courtesans, actors and celebrities contemporary with the prints themselves, that fires the imagination with their stories and circumstances.

Or yet again, others are enthralled simply with the technical excellence of the refined Japanese print, the gorgeous handmade papers, the finely carved lines, the superb printing effects, all of which were made at a level of mastery incapable of being matched today.

Whatever our reason for collecting, we should do so thoughtfully, and as far as our abilities at any given time admit, wisely. Collecting is an exciting adventure, and if done with care and diligence, can in itself be an art.

Dan McKee

The author, Dan McKee is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Japanese literature program at Cornell University, NY.  He has a Master of the Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University, as well as an M.A. from Cornell.

All copyrights for the text of this article are held by the author, rights on images are held by artelino GmbH. Text and images are for personal viewing purposes only and may not be copied or distributed without the prior permission of the author, respectively of artelino GmbH.