Dream Worlds: Modern Japanese Prints and Paintings from the Robert O. Muller Collection

Zeshin was a noted lacquer artist—his primary vocation—and a painter, in addition to being a print designer and each of these skills informed the others with its design sense and palette. His bold treatment of the tip of the crow’s tail, which lures the viewer beyond the boundary of the frame, is a characteristic strategy employed in the design of lacquerware containers as a way to draw attention to more than one decorative plane.

The ancient Chinese symbol of the carp ascending the daunting rapids of a river represents the aspiration, challenge, and successful completion of exams required for advancement in the government’s bureaucracy. Likewise, in Japan this symbol is presented to children as a lesson in perseverance. During the Boy’s Festival in May, koinobori (carp streamers, or literally “climbing carps”) are raised from the rooftops of houses of newborn boys. In this and many other instances, Koson’s choices allude to the symbolic quality of his subject—animal, fish, or bird—but his renderings generally remain within the frame of naturalism.

Imagery of the gibbon, not a native species of Japan, was transmitted from China through the southern Song painters active in the early thirteenth century. The standard iconography sometimes lost precision in its new context, as Japanese artists often substituted domestic simians for the Chinese gibbon. The creature reaching for the moon’s reflection on the water suggests the foolish human aspiration of grasping after what is ultimately fleeting or illusory.

A protagonist in many legends and folktales, the fox is often depicted as a trickster, capable of transforming itself into a beautifully seductive woman—often with comic results. In addition to making use of this tradition, Koson adapts elements from the mid-twelfth century Chūjū giga (Frolicking animals), a long, horizontal handscroll painting in which sanctimonious priests are satirically rendered as monkeys, worshippers as foxes, and even the Buddha-image as a frog. From this ensemble, Koson culls a single playful portrait of a fox sporting a lotus-leaf hat.

In this playful print Koson alludes to the medieval Chōjū giga (Frolicking animals), a series of handscroll paintings from the mid-twelfth century that established the highest level of comedy and competence in anthropomorphic renderings of animals. While those paintings offer satirical commentary on the foibles of aristocracy, Koson’s print simply presents a lighthearted fantasy of frogs engaged in a sumo competition. The leaf here is substituted for the stylized fan usually carried in the contest by an umpire.

This scene depicts the June 9, 1887, slaying of Yasugi Minekichi by his employer, Hanai Oume, the twenty-four-year-old proprietress of a Tokyo teahouse and a former geisha. The beautiful Oume claimed self-defense, contending that Minekichi, who was thirty-four, had been stalking her and, on that fateful night, attacked her with a knife. The prosecution countered the two had long been lovers and Oume had grown weary of his parasitic dependence. The murder, subsequent trial, and conviction of Oume were much publicized, and oglers crowded the courthouse on the day the verdict was delivered.

Kakudayū, the character played by Ichikawa Ennosuke, is a former samurai turned bandit, murderer, and jailbreaker. The plot revels in Kakudayū’s villainy—he sells his daughter into prostitution, attempts to murder his wife, and is otherwise thoroughly scurrilous. As the magistrate Tōyama and his lieutenants close in on him, Kakudayū disguises himself as a blind monk. Here, Kakudayū brandishes his knife, which he has concealed in his walking stick.

Assigned to pursue the enemy in distant Takamatsu, Mitsuhide turned around his forces in a surprise attack on his master, a move that led to Nobunaga’s death at Honnoji, a temple in Kyoto. In the drama, which elaborates on the putative reasons for this treachery, Mitsuhide—the victim of repeated and baseless assaults by his tyrannical master—is ordered to drink sake from a tub reserved for washing horses. Shunsen captures the pivotal moment when, infuritated and ready to explode, Mitsuhide decides to seek revenge. The actor glares intensely in the direction of Honnoki, the site of his eventual rebellion against Nobunaga.

Kataoka Naojirō, the kabuki protagonist represented in this Shunsen print, is a charming gangster and a former samurai who ironically bears the nickname Naozamurai, or “the faithful samurai.” This pensive, lonely figure is caught in the cross drafts of conflicting pressures: He is desperate to flee Edo because the police are closing in on him, but he is even more desperate to pay one last visit to his lovesick mistress, Michitose, a courtesan. A snowstorm further complicates his plight.

Yoshitoshi recounts the story of the courtier Fujiwara no Yasumasa (958-1036), who is strolling on a desolate moor one chilly autumn night when a highwayman, in search of winter clothing, approaches him. Planning to ambush the courtier, the would-be robber is instead lulled by the seductive sounds of Yasumasa’s flute and follows the nobleman to his residence, whereupon the ruffian is presented with a robe. The story suggests a recurring theme of court literature: the victory of culture over violence, of the scholar-courtier over the warrior.

Yoshitoshi explores a legend posthumously associated with the great Japanese feudal lord and scholar Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628-1700). Popularly known as Mito Kōmon, he was revered as a just and exceptionally learned ruler. Here. The artist places the viewer in Mitsukuni’s stead as he enters a cave and finds a Chinese Immortal surrounded by a variety of demons, goblins, and ghosts. Asserting his authority, Mitsukuni demands to know if the assembled are the unrequited souls of warriors past. The supernatural entourage then. Instantly transforms into a band of harmless forest creatures. Mitsukuni’s rescue of this put-upon immortal is consistent with his career and can be thought of as a metaphor for the application of learning and clear thinking over chaos and superstition.

Here Kunichika renders a scene from one of the most famous Japanese ghost stories—“The Mansion of the Dishes”—in which the vengeful ghost of Okiku, a maid-servant, haunts her master and murderer, Aoyama Tessan. According to one version, Okiku, having been falsely accused of breaking a piece of her master’s prized Delft porcelain, is then murdered and cast into a well. Thereafter, her ghost returns nightly, calling from the well, counting the dishes, and wailing.

In November 1930, Yoshida embarked on a five-month journey to India and Southeast Asia as part of a broader effort by the Japanese government to promote cultural links with other Asian nations. During this period, the artist sketched and painted numerous sites of architectural and historical significance. This image of the hazy atmosphere and intricate architectural details of a Mughal castle is one of thirty-two prints based on his pictoral record of that trip. This print required a combination of forty-seven impressions taken from fourteen woodblocks. Five of those impressions alone were needed to create the lacy effect of the window.

According to legend, the Buddhist priest Kūkai (known posthumously as Kōbōdaishi) visited this site on the Izu Peninsula, southwest of Tokyo, in 807. There, he observed a young boy bathing his sick father in the shallows of the river. Deeply moved, Kūkai struck a rock, and the ehaling waters of a hot spring surged forth. Here, a simple wood structure over the hot spring shelters bathers on a rainy night. The illumination from within the bath and the hotel evokes a sense of comfort and warmth on a slightly inhospitable night.

Raizan’s depiction of moonlight on Tokyo Bay at Shinagawa is one of the most distinctive and startling prints produced by any shin hanga artist. The Muller collection includes seventeen works by this artist, about whom virtually nothing is known. The print contains multiple references to techniques being concurrently explored by Japanese painters—bold composition, abstraction, obvious references to textile design, and the inclusion of metallic silver pigment—all used to stunning effect. Perhaps no other print artist of the modern era, with the exception of Kobayashi Kiyochika, so successfully challenged the inroads made by photography.

The scant biographical information on Konen indicates he produced woodblock prints in the traditional ukio-e style for Kobayashi Bunshichi (1864-1923), an art purveyor in Tokyo with an extensive clientele in the United States. Watanabe Shōzaburō, also originally employed by Kobayashi and later the founder of the shin hanga movement, took in Konen after Kobayashi’s death during the devastating 1923 earthquake. In this, perhaps Konen’s most successful print, the artist has fully internalized the new directions pioneered by Watanable. The atmospheric night scene of entertainment along the waterways of Dōtonbori, Osaka, incorporates classic shin hanga elements—dark foreground, complex layerings of light and line, and subtle gradations of color.

This image introduced an installment of a serialized novel Shiragiku (White chrysanthemum) by Ōgoshi Dairoku, published in the literary journal Bungei Kurabu. In a story line that rivals the complexity of the densest Kabuki play, the young woman seen here learns while recuperating at a spa that the blind masseuse who attends her is her father. This striking beauty, clearly a woman of social standing and propriety, is nevertheless depicted with the lightly erotic sentiment that typically infused the prints of an earlier age.

Kiyoshi’s series, Modern styles of women, celebrated the phenomenon of the modan gāru (modern girl). The name itself is one of thousands of examples of Japan’s wholesale absorption of foreign vocabulary, appropriately modified in pronunciation. Known by the shorthand moga, the term was applied to women who embraced current trends and fashions, usually Western, entered a new labor force, and were generally thought of as being far more assertive than the “traditional” Japanese woman. Kiyoshi’s image of such a modern woman fulfills every expectation of the type. From the accountrements of indulgence—cigarettes and cocktails consumed in public—to the direct gaze at the viewer there is a complete abandonment of the demure or feigned coyness often seen in this genre.

This image ranks as one of Shinsui’s most popular and powerful bijin (beauty) studies. Shinsui shows a geisha applying makeup, the band around her head anticipating the imminent placement of a wig. The delicately poised hand usually seen in these prints, often fussing with tresses, here holds an inked brush, ready to lend definition to the eyebrows. The artist challenges the conventional depiction of female reverie, presenting instead a woman thoroughly focused, with a sense of professionalism, on the task of rendering the precise lines of her own carefully designed self-image. The daring use of a deep red background recalls the emblematic color of the pleasure quarters.

Kiyochika was a late-nineteenth-century pioneer of print innovation who often took as his foil the popularity of photography. He is said to have studied with one of Japan’s first professional photographers, Shimooka Renjō (1823-1914). At first glance this surreal image appears to be the multiple exposures of a daguerreotype portrait. The black-and-white tones of the portrait, the oval frame, and the dark background all suggest the influence of photography. Kiyochika conflates the portraits of the three geishas into one, overlapping the facial features of each figure. The artist’s montage alludes to the centuries-old conceit of depicting in paintings three beauties representing the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. The haiku on the poem card to the right reads, “Oh, to see the moon and snow together in the mountain of blossoms.”

A woman, still in her bedclothes and resting on her pillow, seems lost in reverie—perhaps contemplating the previous night’s encounter. The backdrop of green mosquito netting situates this scene on a summer’s morning. Government authorities interpreted Kotondo’s print as salacious and, of the one hundred impressions produced, confiscated thirty that had not yet been sold. Kotondo was one of the few major shin hanga artists who did not have at least some working relationship with publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō. Little is known about the artist’s publisher, Ikeda, other than that he typically issued prints in limited editions of one hundred that were prized for their high quality.

All elements of this beauty study are designed to enhance the stately and slender image of the woman. The depiction of Tomi with the garment’s belt dangling from her mouth is Goyō’s quotation of a pre-modern erotic cliché. While Goyō has produced what appears to be a traditional Japanese print, he has done so with a range of thoroughly Western strategies that elicit fullness, volume, and texture.

Shinsui, like his teacher Kaburagi Kiyokata, was known to have preferred working with real models, often geisha. In this boldly simply design the conventional accountrements of a woman strolling on a snowy night are employed to symbolic effect. The complex layers of forms—the skeleton of the umbrella and the textured pattern of her garment—frame the pensive face. This print, produced seven years after Shinsui’s initial collaboration with Watanabe Shōzaburō, reveals the artist’s maturity.

Goyō’s most active year of print production was 1920. He died the following year, leaving a number of unfinished projects that were subsequently completed by his family. For this and two other 1920 prints (Woman combing her hair, shown upstairs, and Woman in a long undergarment, shown in this room), Goyō used a model known as Tomi. The scant information available suggests that she was either a waitress or a geisha who also took jobs as a model in the Kanda district of Tokyo. The elegantly posed study is as reminiscent of a nineteenth-century French salon painting as it is an evocation of earlier Japanese print masters.

For Yoshitoshi the appearance of beauty is always an ominous sign, never a signal of delight or an opportunity for unfettered pleasure. His beauty subjects invariably carry the burden of tragedy, either past or imminent. Here, he turns to an ancient story that was relayed in narrative paintings, adapted into a Nō drama, and then presented as a Kabuki play that continues to remain popular. The story recounts the obsessive and impossible love that Kiyohime bears for a monk, Anchin, whose vows call for celibacy. Fleeing from her, Anchin seeks refuge in a temple on the far side of the Hidaka River. When Kiyohime pursues him, she is thwarted by the river’s flood-swollen waters. She transforms herself into a serpent, traverses the river, and emerges on the other bank.