I❤️Edo

Every 20 years or so, I fall in love with Edo and I go nuts for Hiroshige.
That’s because the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was last shown at The Brooklyn Museum in 2000.
It was the perfect combination of a great artist and an advanced technology: woodblock printing. They combined to make a work of art that was popular and cheap—an ukiyo-ye print in 1857 cost slightly more than a bowl of noodles, 18 mon for the noodles, 20 mon for the print.

It is still popular; what struck me forcibly in 2002 and again this year is how long viewers spend looking at each print.  The beautifully written title cards enhance the viewing experience drawing you deeper and deeper into the life of an Edoite.

From this more conventional view by Shigamasa, done roughly 90 years earlier, we can see that the genre of views of Edo was well-known and that is why Hiroshige felt free to play with it.
Note the bridge in the lower half.

Hiroshige’s Inside Kameido… by comparison is anything but conventional, not a picture of the shrine itself; it is the view from under the bridge that leads to it. So, one of the witty things about the series is that the Views… are famous—for the locals.
It makes me think of the many times I have been under the bridges of New York City: the Williamsburg Bridge from the tennis courts in East River Park, the Brooklyn Bridge from Washington St., the Bow Bridge from a rowboat in Central Park, etc.

The Hundred Famous… are arranged according to the seasons, starting with the celebration of the New Year. Every View is therefore a specific place at a specific time. For example, the wisteria are blooming over the bridge at Kameido.  At Sugatami, the rice fields in the middle ground have just been cut; that is why they are yellow, also indicative of a time of year. The carp (above in Sumeido Bridge) fly on the 5^th day of the 5^th month at The Boy’s Festival.
There is an uncanny sense of being there or having been there.

This temporary tower is the sign of the biannual spring sumo match and the two white cloths indicate that the weather is suitable today. The offset tower frames the composition on the left; in the center, the pointed roofs and the line of boats lead the eye to Mount Fuji.
Hiroshige effortlessly appropriated Western perspective while retaining that somewhat elevated point of view characteristic of Asian art, and his use of the immediate foreground is spectacular, often occluding a part of the view. He makes our eyes linger on the middle distance too and travel slowly up to the sky.
I also started to wonder whether photography had an influence on Hiroshige’s compositions, but since the first cameras were introduced in the 1850s and the photographs at the time were nothing like Hiroshige’s “snapshots” that does not seem to be the case.

Hiroshige was interested in ordinary things and ordinary people. This is a park where the dyers hung their cloths to dry on sunny days. In the distance, a fire tower: The buildings in Edo were built of wood and fires were common. Another print shows the lumber yards located out of the town center because of the risk. Hiroshige’s father was a fireman and so was Hiroshige.*
In Williamsburg I lived around the corner from Rosenwach Water Towers. I saw it burn down on July 4, 2009, when a firework landed in the yard. That’s one of my famous views of NYC.
There are 19 Views that feature the cherry blossoms in spring, there is a print for the day turtles are sold so that their buyers can set them free, fireworks, waterfalls, shopping streets, workers crossing a bridge in the rain—Hiroshige was known in Japan as “the poet of rain.”

This is the view out the window of a restaurant known for its tofu. According to the title cards, it would be immediately recognizable to anyone who had eaten there. I’m tempted to say that what I love most about this series is the inventive compositions: in View from Massaki… that half moon, the edge of the vase, but actually it is the wave of emotion that Hiroshige evokes for a time and a place I have never been.
Edo was a real place with a million inhabitants but I get the feeling that Hiroshige invented it too.

Idly I wonder: Does a place exist before it is described or painted?

This view of irises seen from below comes as a bit of a shock after the elevated vantage points of the other Views.

In a side room of the Hiroshige exhibit, Takashi Murakami has ripped off the whole show using contemporary copying and printing techniques and a little bit of painting— daubing related tones of paint on to the larger areas of color—because they look boring blown up according to Murakami. It did not help. This can be seen in the detail above—gray splotches on the gray mountain. The line quality is surprisingly bad too, blown up to 10 feet high—Murakami has added some colored dots. Note that they don’t look nearly as awful online as they do in person, where they are physically repellent; viewers spent very little time in the gallery.

Why would Murakami do this, why would the Brooklyn Museum show it?
A friend said “Maybe they did it to make people aware of the beauty and tenderness of the originals.”
I hope so.

—CNQ