Kuniyoshi's Kisokaidô By Charles Mason
	Fukaya   Oiwake Takasaki Charles Mason will give a public talk about the exhibition Tuesday, May 11, at 2:30 P.M. in the Goblet Room. The talk is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments in the Sculpture Court.		FEBRUARY 23, 1999--Known especially for his vivid, imaginative depictions of scenes and characters from Japanese history and legend, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) was one of 19h-century Japan's foremost print designers. During an artistic career of nearly 50 years, Kuniyoshi created thousands of woodblock prints portraying a wide variety of subjects. Among these works, his Kisokaidô series, published between 1852 and 1853, stands out as one of his greatest accomplishments. The Kisokaidô (also called the Nakasendô) was a highway running from east to west through the mountainous center of Japan's main island, Honshû. Like its counterpart the Tôkaidô, which ran along the coast, the Kisokaidô connected the strategically important cities of Edo and Kyôto, and was a vital link in Japan's political and economic infrastructure. Punctuated along its course by 69 intermediate stations, usually villages or towns where travelers could rest, obtain supplies, or change modes of transportation, the Kisokaidô was used by government officials, merchants, pilgrims, and tourists, whose intermingled presence made the road a vital hub of Tokugawa-period (1603-1867) Japanese society and culture. During the 19th century, the Kisokaidô became a favorite subject for designers of topographical landscape prints. The conventional practice at that time was to portray the changing scenery of the road in a series of images, each corresponding to one of the stations along the way. Keisai Eisen (1790-1848) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), for example, took this approach in their successful and extremely influential 70-print Kisokaido series of the 1830s. Kuniyoshi was certainly familiar with and indeed sometimes practiced this traditional mode of representing topographical landscapes. Yet, when he was commissioned by several publishers in the early 1850s to design this Kisokaidô series, he adopted the more innovative strategy of representing the road through famous historical and legendary stories that were associated with its stations, rather than through its actual scenery. Most of the stories and legends in Kuniyoshi's Kisokaidô are based on well-known Kabuki plays of the period. A few of the depicted scenes represent episodes that were supposed to have happened at or near certain spots along the road. More often, however, the subjects of the prints are connected to the Kisokaidô only through verbal or visual puns involving some element of the story and the name of a particular station. These puns are sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, but always clever. The challenges of recognizing the connections between story and place make these prints some of the richest and most engaging in Kuniyoshi's entire oeuvre. Superbly conceived and executed, Kuniyoshi's Kisokaidô takes viewers on an extraordinary imaginary journey that transcends the landscape of a single road, and extends into the much vaster terrain of Japanese cultural history. The Kisokaidô series was one of Kuniyoshi's last major projects as a print designer. Born in Edo in 1798, Kuniyoshi was probably first exposed to artistic design in his family's silk-dyeing business. By the age of 12 he was already training to become a painter and printmaker, and by 14 Kuniyoshi was apprenticed to the great ukiyo-e master Toyokuni (1769-1825), from whom he adopted the surname Utagawa. Kuniyoshi trained with Toyokuni for several years, until he established himself as an independent professional print designer in 1815. During the early years of his career, Kuniyoshi produced mainly images of popular actors and courtesans. In 1820 he designed his first series of famous warriors of the past, and gradually historical and legendary figures became his primary subjects. The peak years of Kuniyoshi's career were between 1844 and 1850, when he ran a large workshop and designed hundreds of original and engaging prints. In 1850, he began to suffer from a debilitating paralysis, and, after an earthquake destroyed his studio in 1856, Kuniyoshi devoted himself almost exclusively to book illustration. He died in 1861, and was buried at the Daisenji temple in Asakusa. Seventy of the original 71 prints of Kuniyoshi's Kisokaidô are on display in the Ripin Print Gallery, along with a selection of comparitive prints from the Eisen and Hiroshige series. All images in the show belong to the Allen Memorial Art Museum's Mary A. Ainsworth collection of Japanese prints.
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