Kunisada: Art within Art

Things get interesting when artists depict other art in their artwork:
Dutch masters such as Vermeer and Rubens including in their paintings depictions of other paintings,
Vincent Van Gogh depicting in portraits Japanese prints pinned to walls,
James McNeill Whistler working a pair of framed pictures into his well-known portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black.
Harunobu, the pioneering Japanese master of the ukiyo-e woodblock art form, included painted screens and scrolls, ikebana arrangements, and clothing patterns of the fabric industry—the many striking kimonos being worn.
Kunisada, an endlessly inventive print designer, built upon Harunobu's device of depicting art, and art-making, in his print imagery.

The device is like nesting stories within stories in literature. The technique—sometimes called the frame story— offers a multi-layered experience (think Boccaccio’s Decameron, the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, Shakespeare’s settings of plays within plays). Kunisada's depictions of art within his art encourage this multi-faceted communication.

In Kunisada's world of the Japanese ukiyo-e print tradition, nested stories were used on the printed sheets in multiple ways.
Cartouches describe aspects of people and places depicted, inserted text names actor’s roles and offer short narratives and poems, transactional notations— artist’s signature and publisher's marks, censor seals, sometimes marks of the carvers or printers. These insertions describe the stories of the design and manufacture of the prints, they also deepen the communication of the imagery.

Kunisada excelled in two dominant print arenas: bijn-e (prints of beautiful women) and yakusha-e (prints of kabuki theater imagery). In the imagery of both genres Kunisada keeps our eyes moving, his compositions engage and guide our explorations of his picture spaces. In his bijn-e prints juxtapositions of pattern and depicted persons and objects often use the device of art within art. In his yakusha-e, Kunisada depicts tangible theater spaces which include references to other spaces: backdrops depicting river or mountain landscapes, painted screens showing moving water, patterns of fall leaves, wood-grain, plant patterns. Echoing the convoluted, multi-layered plot-lines of the kabuki plays, Kunisada's yakusha-e prints use strong diagonals, bold gestures and frozen-moment action to bring a theater dynamic to the fixed printed page.

Taylor McNeil and I, in our mutual interest in Kunisada's prints, have long noted Kunisada's depictions of art within his art. We shaped this exhibit not so much to prove Kunisada did this, or to explain why, but to explore the impact of the technique.
Our goal in the effort?
We think the same as what motivated Kunisada: a desire to explore the delight of visual communication!

Matt Brown

Art Within Art, Worlds Within Worlds (Taylor McNeil)

As a collector of woodblock prints by U. Kunisada, I’m continually looking at them and learning from them—or at least trying to. In the early to mid-1800s, when these prints were made, the sprawling city of Edo—now called Tokyo—was a mysterious place. Isolated from the outside world, Japan thrived economically and culturally. People and scenes depicted in these prints represent that very different world. They are for me a rich puzzle, layered with meanings to be deciphered. 

Each part of the prints has a story to tell. In what are called beauty prints (bijn-e) it is the graceful woman robed in intricately patterned kimonos—but there’s often the art within the art, sometimes in a cartouche, giving hints of landscapes and locales that print buyers in Edo would recognize. For me this is a mystery to be solved: to what and where in Edo are they pointing, and why? 

The kabuki actor prints also hint at connections. In one print from the 1830s, an actor named Sawamura Tosshô I plays a character known as Tsuyuki Mondo, a samurai, who boldly holds open a scroll with a depiction of a bearded monk, perhaps Bodhidharma (the monk who brought Chan Buddhism to China). Symbols are knocked out in white in the blue background around the samurai, one is a bird flying off and another reminds me of the sign of the thunder god. This art depicted in the art, like all of Kunisada’s prints, carried significance for the person who first bought this print almost 200 years ago. For me, it’s a mystery to be appreciated and pondered, an aspect of the richness of Kunisada’s art.

Taylor McNeil