Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered

Overview

Thinking about Utamaro

In March 2014, the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, made an announcement that startled the art world. The new arts center revealed it had discovered and would soon exhibit a long-lost painting attributed to Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), the legendary Japanese artist of the natural world and feminine beauty. Since its rediscovery, scholars have been working to assess the work’s place within Utamaro’s body of work.

Titled Snow at Fukagawa, the immense painting was one of three that traveled to Paris in the late 1880s. Unprecedented in scale, meticulously detailed, and unsigned, the works’ varying sizes challenge the traditional concept of a triptych, or a three-part work. Their relationship to the long-standing theme of “snow, moon, and flowers” has suggested that the paintings may have been intended as a set, but questions remain as to how they would have functioned as such.

The three paintings idealize famous pleasure districts in Edo (now Tokyo). Each one features a different backdrop: snow, moonlight, and blossoming cherry trees. The works also are painted in different styles, suggesting that they were produced over at least a dozen years, from the late 1780s to the early 1800s.

Introduced to the Paris art market in the late nineteenth century, the paintings were quickly dispersed. Museum founder Charles Lang Freer acquired Moon at Shinagawa (also known as Moonlight Revelry at Dozō Sagami) in 1903; it is now in the Freer|Sackler collection. Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara passed through several hands in France until the Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford, Connecticut, purchased it in the late 1950s. And Snow at Fukagawa had been missing for nearly seventy years before it resurfaced in Hakone.

Few recent discoveries in Japanese art have generated so much interest and raised so many questions. Who commissioned these large-scale works? When were they made? How were they displayed and for what occasions? Are they from the hand of Utamaro? And how do we place these works within his career?

About the Exhibition

Fantasy and Reality

Within days of the Okada Museum of Art’s 2014 announcement that it had rediscovered Snow at Fukagawa, communication began to flow between that museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Freer|Sackler. Each institution holds one of the three paintings at the center of Inventing Utamaro: Snow (Okada), Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara (Wadsworth), and Moon at Shinagawa(Freer|Sackler).

Very quickly, all parties agreed to pursue a collaborative exhibition of the three works. Staff from both the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Freer|Sackler traveled to Japan to view the rediscovered painting and to consult on the logistics of this possible collaboration. In December 2015, staff from all three museums met at the Freer|Sackler to determine a path forward.

The ideal outcome would have been to bring Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms together at each of the museums. However, museum founder Charles Lang Freer’s will prohibits lending works of art. A facsimile of Moon thus was created as a stand-in that could be used at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Okada Museum. To accommodate conflicting schedules and lending requirements, each museum also agreed to pursue its own approach to the exhibition.

Julie Nelson Davis, a professor and Utamaro expert, and I curated the Freer|Sackler exhibition. We decided to approach the display as an introduction or reintroduction of the three paintings, reunited after nearly 140 years and explored in multiple contexts. Instead of providing a conclusion, Inventing Utamaro offers an opportunity to reexamine this legendary Japanese artist and his work, looking more closely at the fantasy and reality that surround them both.

The exhibition begins by presenting Utamaro and his work at two critical moments—between the late 1780s and the early 1800s, when he created Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms, and at the turn of the twentieth century, when the three paintings appeared in Paris amid a craze for all things Utamaro. Separated by a hundred years, these two moments reflect very interesting and interrelated sets of circumstances.

The first moment lies in Japan during Utamaro’s lifetime (1753–1806). Based on a recent study of Utamaro’s work, Julie was the first to articulate that publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō had marketed the artist as being intimately familiar with the pleasures he depicted. Tsutaya put forward Utamaro’s works as accurate depictions of beauty and sensuality created not by a journeyman artist but by someone immersed fully in that world. That sophisticated immersion became the Utamaro “brand.”

The second moment is in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. As explored in the exhibition, a rage for Utamaro took hold there in the early 1890s. Nearly a century after Utamaro’s death, dealers, collectors, artists, and experts reinforced the portrayal of the artist as a sensitive chronicler of Japan’s pleasure quarters.

Julie and I knew that no previous exhibition had offered this notion of the Utamaro “brand” as a lens through which to understand the artist and his work. In the foregrounding galleries of Inventing Utamaro, viewers encounter the Parisian fin-de-siècle world of art, the fashion for art nouveau, and the veneer that overlaid the marketing of Japanese works. By beginning with this exploration of the Japanese and Parisian markets for exotic fantasies, we attempt to show why Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms were produced, as well as why and in what context they resurfaced some one hundred years later.

These galleries lead to the main room of the exhibition, in which the three key paintings are displayed. Current scholarship identifies about fifty paintings with credible Utamaro signatures and seals. Though Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms are unsigned and unsealed, scholars generally include this ensemble within the artist’s oeuvre. An ideal exhibition would assemble sheet prints, books, and as many paintings as possible credited to Utamaro and place Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms in their midst. Such an undertaking was well beyond the scale of possibility, but we have been able to achieve a similar context with fewer works. Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms are juxtaposed with Utamaro’s prints, suggesting that he and his studio reused motifs to form innovative designs.

A final gallery delves more deeply into Charles Lang Freer’s collecting of Japanese paintings of “beauties” during the first few years of the twentieth century. Alongside Utamaro’s paintings are works by other painters of “beauties”—as well as pieces mistakenly attributed to Utamaro’s hand—which together hint at Freer’s collecting motivations and conundrums. We hope it becomes clear that Freer, aided by Whistler and abetted by Thomas Dewing, another of his favorite American artists, saw the images of Japanese women by Utamaro and his peers as connections to a universal ideal. One suspects that Freer was less interested in the true backstory of these “courtesans” than he was in the fantasy of otherworldly beauty.

As we developed the exhibition’s arc, Julie and I worked to show both this fantasy world and the reality. We realized that the exhibition presented two moments when the desire to indulge in aesthetic fantasy meant politely ignoring a darker reality—that of indentured sexual servitude. We took care to describe the true specifics of the three pleasure quarters depicted in Snow, Moon, and Cherry Blossoms.

We chose to close the exhibition with two photographs. One, from the Meiji era, shows women of the Yoshiwara “on display” behind the wood slats more glamorously depicted in Utamaro’s prints. The photograph, although surely posed, cannot disguise the women’s dour expressions and the wretchedness of the whole enterprise. The other image, taken recently, shows a large monument in Tokyo dedicated to thousands of women who died young (most by age twenty-one) in this harsh “trade.” Their remains were unclaimed by their families.

Much like the subjects of Utamaro’s art, Inventing Utamaro is a blend of beauty and vice, fact and fiction, fantasy and brutal reality. We hope the exhibition stimulates your curiosity and leads you to reconsider this legendary Japanese artist, his world, and our expectations of his works.

Paris and Utamaro

Highlights Gallery

Marketing Utamaro

Cataloguing Nature, Cataloguing Beauty

In Edo-period Japan, trade was limited to exchange with the Chinese and the Dutch. Materials and ideas that came in included European concepts of scientific thinking. In Japan, the orderly categorization of nature through such activities as collecting seashells or raising exotic plants became marks of sophistication. Utamaro’s gorgeous illustrations for books of shells and insects signified his membership in this elite world.

The artist’s naturalist gaze was extended to beautiful women. In prints and books published by Tsutaya Jūzaburō, Utamaro categorized women across society, from high-ranking courtesans to wet nurses and waitresses. For the rest of his career, Utamaro was promoted as a connoisseur of this subject, helping him become the late eighteenth century’s leading depicter of “beauties.”

While earlier ukiyo-e artists rendered women as delicate and petite, in the early 1780s, Torii Kiyonaga transformed the feminine ideal into a more statuesque form. Perhaps in response to European ideas about the body, he shifted figural proportions to a new, taller ratio. This became the template for Utamaro and later artists.

Freer and Utamaro

A Detroit industrialist, Charles Lang Freer met the American artist James McNeill Whistler in London in 1890. The artist influenced Freer to begin collecting Asian art.

Whistler had been using Asian imagery—kimono-clad Western models surrounded by Japanese prints or Chinese porcelains—in his paintings since the 1860s. His goal was not to introduce Western viewers to exotic lands but rather to escape the constraints of Victorian-era painting. By depicting newly available Japanese and Chinese objects, Whistler presented new colors, patterns, and compositions. Freer, however, saw in Whistler’s art “points of contact” between East and West. From the 1890s until his death in 1919, Freer acquired both Whistler’s finest pieces and numerous Asian artworks.

When Freer first encountered Asian art, he was particularly intrigued by Japanese paintings, stoneware ceramics, and tea-ceremony items. While other enthusiasts were focusing on popular collectibles such as netsuke, dolls, woodblock prints, and enameled porcelain, Freer’s first Asian art purchase in 1887 was a painted Japanese fan. Between 1894 and 1911, Freer made four extended visits to Japan, and, by the time of his death in 1919, he had collected over two thousand works of Japanese art.

In his letters and diaries, Freer expressed disappointment with a modernizing Japan. For him, the gritty port of Yokohama, for example, differed little from Detroit, his hometown. Like many nostalgic Westerners of his day, Freer preferred structured evocations of an “unchanging” past. Along with Japan’s well-tended gardens, these evocations included renderings of idealized women from the former “floating world.” Freer collected nearly one hundred Japanese paintings featuring such “beauties.”

Whistler likely introduced Freer to the dealer Siegfried Bing, who considered the collector a premier client. Born to a German family long connected to Japan through business interests, the dealer Siegfried Bing both helped form and profited from the art nouveau movement. Bing had avidly promoted Japanese works in Paris since the 1860s. In 1895, he opened Maison de l’Art Nouveau, his Paris gallery. There, notable artists of the day—such as Monet, Van Gogh, and Whistler—and designers such as Vever and Tiffany followed Bing’s lead in appreciating Japanese art.

One of Bing’s principal competitors and collaborators was the dealer Hayashi Tadamasa. Brought to Paris as an interpreter at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, Hayashi became a major purveyor of Japanese art—particularly woodblock prints. Hayashi’s seal was soon established as a connoisseur’s affirmation of quality.

In the early 1900s, Hayashi decided to sell his private collection and return to Japan. He authorized Bing to manage the auctions. In the February 1903 sale, Freer acquired Utamaro’s Moon at Shinagawa. Freer later wrote to Bing that he was very pleased with the purchase, though he commented on the painting’s unwieldy size: “. . . the Utamaro I am glad to have, notwithstanding the fact that it is a very difficult piece to handle.”