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Description:

The strength of the Museum’s collection of Japanese color woodblock prints lies in an area that is still considered controversial by many Ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) connoisseurs—the mid- to late-nineteenth century. This period of stress in Japanese society marked the end of the peaceful but extremely authoritarian, reclusive, and feudalistic Tokugawa regime and the turbulent beginnings of a Japan that was opening itself to the West. Natural and social cataclysm were matched by the wild and sometimes anguished creativity of the daring and imaginative generations of Ukiyo-e printmakers who came after Utamaro, an artist renowned for the breathtaking elegance and serenity of his “Classical” restraint.

The title of the exhibition comes from a poem inscribed on a print by Yoshitoshi, who is considered the final and culminating master of Ukiyo-e. From his landmark One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, the print depicts the poet and nun Lady Chiyo, who is best known for a poem in which she tells of her decision to borrow a bucket of water from a neighbor; her own well bucket has been ensnared overnight by morning glories, whose summer beauty she wishes to leave intact. In Yoshitoshi’s print, however, she is shown in autumn, transfixed over her fallen well bucket. The inscribed poem states that the poet has now dropped her bucket and spilled its contents, so that “the moon has no home in the water.”

Approximately sixty works (including diptychs and triptychs by Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Kuniyoshi’s extraordinary pupil Yoshitosh) have been selected for exhibition from a collection of three hundred. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which was curated by Sandy Kita, assistant professor of Japanese art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Stephen Margulies, curator of works on paper.

beginning September 2004

Exhibition fee: