CONDITIONS PRECEDING THE RISE OF PRINT-DESIGNING: THE BIRTH OF THE
UKIOYE SCHOOL
At the outset of the seventeenth century was inaugurated the Tokugawa
Dynasty of Shoguns or military dictators, by the victories of the great
warrior and statesman Iyeyasu over rival factions. Upon acquiring the
Shogunate--a position which had for long eclipsed the power of the
Emperor--Iyeyasu laid a wise but iron hand upon Japan, forcing all
departments of industry, society, and even art into rigid forms whose
pattern was laid down by his far-seeing mind. The same policy guided his
successors of the Tokugawa Dynasty; so that during the whole period of
print production Japan was a land of gorgeous feudal splendour,
regulated by inflexible rules of conduct and manners that amounted
almost to caste regulations.
That subtle interpreter of the ideals of the East, the late Kakuzo
Okakura, thus analyses the state of society at that time: "The
Tokugawas," he writes, "in their eagerness for consolidation and
discipline, crushed out the vital spark from art and life.... In their
prime of power, the whole of society--and art was not exempt--was cast
in a single mould. The spirit which secluded Japan from all foreign
intercourse, and regulated every daily routine, from that of the daimyo
to that of the lowest peasant, narrowed and cramped artistic
creativeness also. The Kano academies of painting--filled with the
disciplinary instincts of Iyeyasu--of which four were under the direct
patronage of the Shogun and sixteen under the Tokugawa Government, were
constituted on the plan of regular feudal tenures. Each academy had its
hereditary lord, who followed his profession, and, whether or not he was
an indifferent artist, had under him students who flocked from various
parts of the country, and who were, in their turn, official painters to
different daimyos in the provinces. After graduating at Yedo (Tokyo), it
was _de rigueur_ for these students, returning to the country, to
conduct their work there on the methods, and according to the models
given them during their instruction. The students who were not vassals
of daimyos were, in a sense, hereditary fiefs of the Kano lords. Each
had to pursue the course of studies laid down by Tannyu and Tsunenobu,
and each painted and drew certain subjects in a certain manner. From
this routine, departure meant ostracism, which would reduce the artist
to the position of a common craftsman."
Yet it would convey a wrong impression of the Tokugawa period to suggest
that bureaucratic tightness of regime was its sole or most vital
characteristic. The age was marked as strongly by its expansive powers
as by the restraints that attempted to direct them. For in this epoch,
the common people, set apart in a class distinct from the warriors and
aristocracy, rose to a vigour and cultivation that was almost a new
thing in Japanese history. "It was," writes Fenollosa, "like the rise of
the industrial classes in the free cities of Europe in those middle
centuries when the old feudal system was breaking up. There, too, could
be seen armoured lords of castles flourishing side by side with burghers
and guilders. It is the same duality which forms the keynote of Tokugawa
culture taken as a whole.... The keynote of Tokugawa life and art is
their broad division into two main streams--the aristocratic and the
plebeian. These two flowed on side by side with comparatively little
intermingling. On the one side select companies of gentlemen and ladies
congregated in gorgeous castles and yashikis, daimyos and samurai,
exercising, studying their own and China's past, weaving martial codes
of honour, surrounding themselves with wonderful utensils of lacquer,
porcelain, embroidery, and cunningly wrought bronze; and on the other
side great cities like Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Yedo, swarming with
manufacturers, artizans, and merchants, sharing little in the castle
privileges, but devising for themselves methods of self-expression in
local government, schools, science, literature, and art."
Examining into the history of Japanese colour-prints, one must leave
entirely aside the interesting and sometimes sublime art of the
cultivated and aristocratic classes and their tradition-hallowed
schools of painting. The prints were solely the product of the popular
school; they were in a way allied to those delicate Japanese
handicrafts, such as bronze and lacquer, which are characteristically
the output of the common people.
The Tokugawa regime was one of national peace. The country, long
disturbed by both internal and external wars, settled down at last under
the strong Tokugawa banner to two centuries and a half of tranquillity.
The vital activity of this time was not diffused and scattered over the
whole country, but was chiefly centred upon one spot, the ancient
"Capital of the East," Yedo, now called Tokyo. Here, under the dominance
of the great Iyeyasu, the life of the empire was brought to a focus.
Iyeyasu forced all the great nobles, living customarily on their estates
scattered throughout the empire, to come to Yedo and remain there in
residence for at least half of each year, in order that he might keep
his hand upon them and prevent them from springing up to rival power.
The natural effect of this regulation was to give Yedo a supreme
importance in the realm, and to cultivate in Yedo the growth of every
form of popular activity. There, in the metropolitan centre, all the
agencies of pleasure burst into luxurious bloom; the tea-houses, the
theatres, the riverside gardens, and the Yoshiwara or courtesans'
quarter, all took on a new and alluring splendour; and Yedo became the
great city and the great art centre of Japan.
At this time, aristocratic art, in the hands of the later generations of
the Kano School of painters, was not only largely inaccessible to the
common people, but was also no longer in its prime. The giants of the
Kano School were long since dead. In the place of their vigorous
inspiration only superficiality and formalism remained. Long since dead
was that lofty idealistic art, best known to us in the work of Sesshu,
which had distinguished the preceding Ashikaga Period--an art which, to
quote Mr. Laurence Binyon, "deals little in human figures and has no
concern with the physical beauty of men and women, contenting itself
mainly with the contemplation of wide prospects over lake and mountain,
mist and torrent, or a spray of sensitive blossoms trembling in the
air." Yet even though the earlier greatness of the aristocratic schools
of painting was passing or had passed in this seventeenth and eighteenth
century epoch, still the authority derived by the Kano painters from
their connection with the court of the Shogun gave them dictatorship
over matters of art; and their academy imposed its technique upon all
aspirants for the favour of the aristocracy. The rival school of the
Tosas, associated closely with the court of the Emperor in Kyoto, was no
less careful of tradition and discipline. Thus the moribund art of the
upper classes stood alone like a little island, shut out from the art of
the people, unable to influence it or to be influenced by it.
Therefore Japan, at the time when the popular school came into
existence, was in a curious state: subject to a strict disciplinary
system that kept the common people and the aristocracy apart; enjoying
a period of peace and a centralization of resources that gave the common
people in their isolation a favourable opportunity to develop a culture
of their own; and suffering from a growing degeneracy in the classical
schools of painting that might be counted on to drive at least an
occasional aristocratic artist out into the ranks of the people were any
interesting opportunity offered there.
At this juncture, early in the seventeenth century, there arose in Yedo
a new movement which later was to produce the colour-print.
This new movement was called the Ukioye School. The real gap between it
and the older classical schools has been by many writers grossly
exaggerated. One might well gather from them that the Ukioye artists
were the first in all Japanese art to draw subjects selected from real
life and to paint with vivid humanism. This is by no means the fact. All
the subjects treated by the Ukioye painters had been at some time used
by the painters of the older schools; and certainly the usual subject of
the Kano or Tosa painter was as real and vivid to him as were any of the
themes of the popular artists to these creators. Each painted his
customary environment--what was closest to his experience and dearest to
his æsthetic perceptions: on the one hand, traditionary and religious
figures, scenes from poetry, reflections of Chinese or old Japanese art;
and on the other hand, the pulsing life of Yedo streets, the tea-gardens
of the Sumida River, the theatres, and the brilliant houses of pleasure.
Yet having suggested that the gap between the two was not immeasurable,
we may grant that it was nevertheless real. Ukioye concerned itself with
contemporary plebeian life, its shows and festivals and favourites of
the hour, to an extent alien to the more restrained and almost monastic
tradition of the older art. Ukioye means "Passing-world Picture"; there
is implied in the word a reproach and an accusation of triviality. It
suggests values not recognized by that orthodox Buddhistic attitude of
contemplation which regards life as a show of shadows, a region of
temporal desire and illusion and misery, a vigil to be endured only by
keeping fixedly before the vision pictures of the desireless calm of
Nirvana. But no such profound philosophy of despair and abnegation as
this could find real root in the hearts of a lively populace like that
of Japan; in that nation, the lonely minds of sequestered aristocrats
alone could give it more than nominal habitation. The Ukioye School,
since it was a popular school, remained as unshadowed by Buddhism as
modern French poster-art is by Christianity; and the distance between
the spiritual attitudes of Giotto and Aubrey Beardsley is no greater
than that between the attitudes of Kanaoka and Utamaro. All that aureole
of moral idealism which hallowed the classical Japanese art was
abandoned by the popular school for a frank acceptance of the joy of the
world and its enthralling lures.
The style adopted by the new school in portraying the life of the
multitude allowed itself a certain keen realism, often tinged with
humour and sometimes with mild obscenity. This realism appears only
occasionally, and it is generally so completely subordinated to the
decorative impulse that realism is the last word by which a Western
observer would describe it. Only by way of contrasting it with the
idealism of the older schools can one thus classify the arbitrary
attitudes, mask-like faces, and fanciful colour schemes of Ukioye. This
arbitrariness indicates another characteristic of the new manner. It was
a flippant style which took nothing seriously except itself. Its
technique departed from the sacred traditions of Kano and Tosa brushwork
and the inheritance of Chinese painting canons. It developed a novel use
of clear, hard outline, unrestrained sweep, brilliantly fresh colour,
and strong contrast, that relied on no precedent for their appeal and
awakened no sanctioning echo from the classic masters.
Not unnaturally the aristocracy were repelled by the plebeian and vulgar
nature of the subjects of the new school. Their sensibilities were
injured by the throwing overboard of traditions of style that stretched
back through many centuries to the founders of the art in China, and by
the genuine lack of distinction in the spiritual attitude and outlook of
many of these new painters. The modern European, bred of a different
artistic lineage, may regard these objections as negligible; but he must
remember that it is perhaps his own ignorance of Japanese classics that
makes him so tolerant; and he may properly hesitate to condemn hastily
the aristocratic Japanese opinion.
The aristocratic opinion is readily comprehensible. The Ukioye School
without doubt lacks that almost religious idealism by which the earlier
Japanese schools of painting attained a subtlety perhaps excessively
rarefied, an allusiveness almost too remote, a sublimation of intangible
spiritual values that very nearly reaches the vanishing-point. No such
serene cultivation of feeling is to be found in the Ukioye painters.
"Great art is that before which we long to die," says Okakura; and the
overstrained intensity of his words conveys to the Westerner some
conception of the passionate spirituality which the cultivated Japanese
desires and finds in the works of the older painters. The Japanese
connoisseur misses in Ukioye that exaltation which, in the creations of
Sesshu or Yeitoku or Kanaoka, leads him up to heights whence he surveys
mountain and lake lying like a visionary incantation before him, or
feels the giant loneliness of pines upon a snowy crest, or enters into
the ineffable spirit of the white goddess Kwannon meditating in a
measureless void of clouds and streams.
These things are not to be found in Ukioye--these ultimate reaches of
the Oriental spirit; but there is here a more human and lovable beauty,
and a power of design no less notable than that of the aristocratic
masters.
It must be granted that the colour-prints of this school constitute the
fullest and most characteristic expression ever given to the temper of
the Japanese people. Asia--the region of measureless, overwhelming
spaces, innumerable lives, and immemorial antiquity--Asia speaks in the
older paintings; but in the amiable prints, the one voice is the
defined, circumscribed, and beguiling voice of Japan. The colour-print
constitutes almost the only purely Japanese art, and the only graphic
record of popular Japanese life. Therefore it may be regarded as the
most definitely national of all the forms of expression used by the
Japanese--an art which they alone in the history of the world have
brought to perfection.
The beginnings of the Ukioye School antedated by many years the
beginnings of colour-printing. Iwasa Matabei, the founder of the school,
was born in 1578 and died in 1650. At first it was the aristocracy that
applauded this pioneer, who was not yet alienated from them; then some
vital element in Matabei's manner kindled enthusiasm outside this
circumscribed region and set in motion the forces which eventually
resulted in a popular school of art.
After Matabei, the Ukioye School did not take any immediate turn toward
notable development. In fact, it is doubtful whether its importance
could have been far-reaching had its activity been always, as in its
earliest days, confined to painting. It was, however, the destiny of the
school to come into a relation with the hitherto undeveloped art of
wood-engraving; and its alliance with this popular medium increased a
thousand-fold the breadth of its appeal and the force of its sway.
The art of wood-engraving in Japan originated some time between the
twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Legend associates the first use of it
with the great priest Nichiren, who lived from 1222 to 1282. Ryokin,
also a priest, produced a woodcut which is dated 1325. No date earlier
than this last can be fixed upon with any confidence. The few specimens
of early woodcuts that have survived are pious Buddhistic
representations of religious paintings or statues, which were probably
sold to pilgrims as mementoes of their visit to some famous shrine. In
artistic merit these earliest woodcuts have no interest; their
importance is entirely historical.
By the end of the sixteenth century the process of wood-engraving had
come into use as a means of illustrating books. From this time on,
mythological, romantic, and legendary works, such as the "Ise
Monogatari," were frequently so embellished. Most of the designs were
very crude, and the cutting of the wood blocks displayed only elementary
skill. These early books were in no way connected with the Ukioye
School, which they in fact antedated; they were wholly the product of
the old classical tradition. Contemporaneously with them were produced
fairly vigorous but clumsy broadsides, representing historical scenes.
Occasionally a few spots of coarse colour were applied by hand to these
designs.
By the middle of the seventeenth century there began to appear
illustrated books in which the rudimentary elements of artistic
pictorial feeling are visible. A few have a slight Ukioye cast. Not
until the last quarter of the century, however, did wood-engraving
achieve the dignity of a fine art and the scope of a popular method of
expression. That it then did so was due to the genius of Moronobu, an
Ukioye painter, the first of the great print-designers.
III
THE FIRST
PERIOD:
THE PRIMITIVES
FROM MORONOBU
TO THE INVENTION
OF POLYCHROME PRINTING
(1660-1764)