Japanese woodcuts depicted breathtaking landscapes, blushing eroticism, terrifying spirits and demons, and made stars of sumo wrestlers andkabuki actors. This edition brings together rare prints from the period 1710-1925, and presents the best prints from museums and private collections around the world.

Wooden Wonders

A visual history of Japanese masterpieces

From Edouard Manet's portrait of the naturalist writer Émile Zola in a Japanese print to the meticulous copies of Hiroshige prints that Van Gogh devotedly collected, the pioneers of 19th century European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom and effervescence, the woodcut is the quintessential example of the wave of Japonisme that first captivated France and later the whole of Europe, often in the form of misunderstood exotic objects that helped inspire Western creativity.
The Japanese woodcut is a phenomenon with no equivalent in Western art. Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern art - including, as Karl Marx expressed it, that everything solid melts in air - were invented in Japan in the early 18th century and expressed as never before in the works of masters such as Hokusai, Utamaro and Hiroshig in the early 19th century.
This volume unveils a much-loved but little-understood art form by presenting the most outstanding prints of Japanese woodblock prints in their historical context. From the 17th century development of the decadentukiyo-e, or paintings of the floating world, to the decline and subsequent revival of printmaking in the early 20th century, the images collected in this edition form a document not only of a unique genre in the history of art, but also of the changing mores and cultural development of Japan.
We discover the four pillars of woodblock prints: beautiful women, actors, landscapes, and compositions with birds and flowers, along with depictions of sumo wrestlers, dekabukio actors, seductive courtesans, the great stars who populated the floating world whose fan base fuelled the frenzied production of woodcuts. We delve into the horrific and the dark in prints where demons and ghosts haunt the living: breathtaking images that continue to influence Japanese manga, film and video games to this day. We witness how, in their incredible variety, from the everyday to the erotic and from the martial to the mythological, these works share the technical mastery and unerring eye of their creators, and how, with enormous ingenuity and wry wit, publishers and artists struggled to circumvent official censorship.
This edition brings together the finest prints held in museums and private collections around the world and offers descriptions that guide us through this electrifying period in the history of Japanese art.

About the author

Andreas Marks studied East Asian art history at the University of Bonn and obtained his PhD in Japanese studies at the University of Leiden with a thesis on 19th century actor prints. From 2008 to 2013 he was director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art in Hanford, California, and since 2013 he has been curator of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese and Korean Art and director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Publisher: Taschen