Il mondo fluttuante. UKIYOE. Visione dal Giappone
Museo di Roma Palazzo Braschi, Roma February 20 – June 23, 2024
The exhibition shows 150 masterpieces of Japanese art from the Edo period, between the 17th and 19th centuries, focusing on what was the most innovative artistic strand of the time and internationally still influential today: ukiyoe.
Literally translatable as ‘pictures of the floating world', it is a pictorial genre that originated in the Edo period (1603-1868) and includes rolls to be hung and unrolled in one's hands, as well as large-format screens, painted with a brushstroke on silk or paper, and prints made in polychrome with a wooden matrix on paper. What we get from the exhibition is an overview of the approximately two hundred and fifty years under the military rule of the Tokugawa, a long period of peace marked by great social, economic and artistic changes that ended with the forced reopening of the country to trade with Western powers from the mid-19th century and the Meiji Restoration that returned the Emperor to the centre of power.
The ukiyoe technique, imported from China, implemented the dissemination of images and books allowing for mass production thanks also to the talent of the hired artists. The production of prints, in fact, represented a real market and many were the artists and professionals, who worked in ateliers under the direction of a publisher. The great novelty that ukiyoe conveyed was the subjects, completely different from the great aristocratic wall painting in the service of the powerful and the classical schools of Kyoto. Ukiyo, which until then had been understood in the sense of attachment to the illusory earthly world from which to flee, according to Buddhist teaching, now took on an opposite sense of enjoyment of the fleeting moment and everything that was fashionable. In this sense, the ukiyoe is a direct testimony of Japanese society of the time, of the customs and fashions to be worn and of the most sought-after urban views.
The ukiyoe, however, behind the tale of new fashions and lifestyles, also reveals a cultural refinement testified by the diffusion of the arts understood as formative disciplines of the cultured individual, sometimes used as an expedient to circumvent government censorship that banned subjects related to courtesans and actors, hidden by artists and publishers under veiled moral and moralistic teachings. ▲