"Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print"

2nd\NE Quadrant The Approval Matrix: Week of April 7, 2008

"Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900" presents more than seventy prints from the renowned Van Vleck collection of Japanese woodblock prints at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison and approximately twenty prints from the Brooklyn Museum. The Utagawa School, founded by Utagawa Toyoharu, dominated the Japanese print market in the nineteenth century and is responsible for more than half of all surviving ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures of the floating world.” Colorful, technically innovative, and sometimes defiant of government regulations, these prints were created for a popular audience and documented the pleasures of urban life and leisure. The prints represent famous places, landscapes, warriors, and kabuki actors; they were reproduced in books, posters, and other printed materials for mass consumption, and they fed a thriving Edo publishing industry.

March 21–June 15, 2008 Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor Brooklyn Museum

Joan Cummins, coordinator of our presentation of "Utagawa" and the Museum's Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art, gives an overview of the exhibition.