Arthur Ross Gallery Exhibition - "A Sense of Place: Modern Japanese Prints"

Exhibition - "A Sense of Place: Modern Japanese Prints"

April 9 – June 21, 2015

Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania

Opening reception: April 9, 2015, 5:00 to 7:30

This exhibition brings together Japanese prints addressing the idea of place and landscape in the modern era.  When artists selected famous sites and landscapes for their work, they actively reinterpreted the concept of “famous places” (meisho), one of the most influential concepts of landscape imagery in traditional Japan.  Initially linked to courtly poetry practices that named and praised significant sites, by the later eighteenth century savvy commercial print publishers adapted the theme to create a new set of famous locales in the city of Edo (now Tokyo) as well as more distant must-see destinations.

In the twentieth century, artists working in print media referenced these landscapes when they selected famous sites for their own work.  In a century that bore witness to two world wars, globalization, and a succession of modern art movements, the concept of “place” was anything but simple for generations of twentieth-century Japanese print artists working at home and abroad.  While some artists reflected upon the changes of the twentieth century in their work, some promoted sites of national importance, and still others sought to reimagine what constituted “famous places” in the new landscapes of modern Japan as well as in the world beyond.  This exhibition brings together prints on this theme, with works selected from the holdings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and private collections.

An interdisciplinary symposium complementing the exhibition will be held on April 18, 2015 at the Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.  This symposium will bring together scholars from around the country to put modern Japanese prints into the broader historical, social, and artistic contexts that shaped the work of Japanese printmakers throughout the twentieth century.  It will also include a special roundtable session with collectors and dealers specializing in modern Japanese prints.  More details about the symposium can be found at: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/japanese_prints.html

Curators:

Julie Nelson Davis, Associate Professor, History of Art

Quintana Heathman and Jeannie Kenmotsu, doctoral candidates, History of Art

With assistance from students in two curatorial seminars

 

Left Image: Yoshida Hiroshi, Morning at Mt. Tsurugi (Tsurugizan no asa), from the series Twelve Prints of the Japan Alps (Nihon Arupusu jūnidai no ichi), 1926
Color woodcut
15 5/8 x 10 3/4 inches (39.7 x 27.3 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967

Right Image: Munakata Shikō, Volcano From the series Ryuri Hanga Saku, 1955
Hand-colored woodcut
12 1/8 x 10 1/2 inches (30.8 x 26.7 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the George W.B. Taylor Fund, 1958