Dreams of Desire 63 (Utamaro)

Kitagawa Utamaro-Lovers in the Upstairs Room of a Teahouse 1788

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 opened Japan’s ports again to foreign trade after 200 years of international isolation. Soon Japanese art and artefacts found their way to Paris and London which resulted in a craze known as Japonisme. Ukiyo-e, particularly the works of the masters, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kitagawa Utamaro, would have a profound effect upon the first of all modern art movements, Impressionism.

Utamaro was renowned for his psychologically astute portraits of courtesans. Employing sophisticated compositional techniques of partial views, striking mannerism and subtle gradients of light and shade, Utamaro was collected by many luminaries of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, notably Degas, Gaugain and Toulouse-Lautrec. The serenity of his female studies were clearly a major influence on the ground-breaking female artist Mary Cassett.

Utamaro, like every ukiyo-e artist produced a large body of shunga. His sensitivity to female beauty combined with the intimacy and tenderness of many of the scenes portrayed rank among the finest examples of erotic art.

Utamaro-Three Beauties of the Present Day

Utamaro

Utamaro

Utamaro-Woodcut

Takashima Ohisa using two mirrors to observe her coiffure night of the Asakusa Marketing Festival

Utamaro-

Utamaro-Hairdresser

Utamaro

Dreams of Desire 62 (Hokusai)

Hokusai-Gods of Myriad Conjugal Delights-1821

Katsushika Hokusai is undoubtedly the most famous ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) artist of the Edo period. Not only was he responsible for the single most famous Japanese artwork, The Great Wave OffKanagawa, his The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is the most widely known example of shunga (spring pictures), the astounding Japanese erotic art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries.

What is striking about ukiyo-e is that every major artist of the period produced shunga, including Eiri, Utamaro, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada and Eisen. Although shunga was subject to periodic censorship by the shogunate, this didn’t seem to affect its widespread popularity among all classes of Japanese society. It was also a highly profitable venture for the artist who could supplement their income for months with a single painting.

Below are examples of Hokusai’s work, including The Great Wave Off Kanagawa as well as some brillitantly executed shunga.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

Hokusai-Sea Cucumber

Hokusai-Entangled

Hokusai

Hokusai

Hokusai

Hokusai

Hokusai

Hokusai

Dreams of Desire 26 (Pictures of the Floating World)

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife-Hokusai 1814

Hokusai’s  ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) woodcut design for the three volume collection of  erotic tales Young Pines from 1814 is the most famous example of shunga (pictures of spring; spring being a euphemism for sex) created by the one of the masters of Japanese art from the Edo period.

Depicting a shell diver being caressed intimately by two octopi, the surrounding text tells of the mutual pleasure experienced by both the woman and the octopi. However when the image was first seen in the West it was without a sufficient understanding of the accompanying text and critics, including Edmond de Goncourt interpreted the design as representing a non consensual act.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife influenced Felicien Rops, Rodin and Pablo Picasso who painted his own version in 1903, and along with other shuga shaped the perception of the exotically other Far East as an ultra-sophisticated, decadent playground, where eroticism had been refined by every possible means into a deviant art-form. The ultimate expression of this Orientalizing tendency  can be found in Octave Mirbeau’s opiated fantasy of a mythic China in Le Jardin des supplices (The Torture Garden).  In Japan it has been hugely influential and has spawned a whole sub-genre within anime and manga.