Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty

Book excerpt: One of the most influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") in late-eighteenth-century Japan, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806) was widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In images showing courtesans, geisha, housewives, and others, Utamaro made the practice of distinguishing social types into a connoisseurial art. In 1804, at the height of his success, Utamaro, along with several colleagues, was manacled and put under house arrest for fifty days for making prints of the military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi enjoying the pleasures of the "floating world." The event put into stark relief the challenge that popular representation posed to political authority and, according to some sources, may have precipitated Utamaro’s sudden decline. In this book Julie Nelson Davis makes a close study of selected print sets, and by drawing on a wide range of period sources reinterprets Utamaro in the context of his times. Reconstructing the place of the ukiyo-e artist within the world of the commercial print market, she demonstrates how Utamaro’s images participated in the economies of entertainment and desire in the city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo). Offering a new approach to issues of the status of the artist and the construction of identity, gender, sexuality, and celebrity in the Edo period, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty is a significant contribution to the field and a key work for readers interested in Japanese art and culture.