Yumeji Modern

Book excerpt: "Beyond the Modern Beauty is a holistic study of Takehisa Yumeji's (1884-1934) artistry that attempts to unify and understand the multiple discursive and social frameworks within which his images were animated with meaning. The book situates Yumeji's graphic art within the emerging mediascape of the 1900s and 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic media were enabling the creation of new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji's graphic works developed in tandem with this quickly evolving sphere and ranged from illustrations in socialist bulletins with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" in books and magazines targeting a female audience. As such, Yumeji's works circulated widely and reveal his role in the cultivation of a new demographic of young female consumers, along with the reinvention of the woodblock medium from its centuries-long tradition of "floating-world pictures" (ukiyo-e) into a technically diverse vehicle of visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. The book addresses Yumeji's art from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his production of graphic works was the most prolific. The appendix introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji's texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, books, collection of works, and commentary alongside his illustrations. Commentaries and critiques by his contemporaries are also included and are translated for the first time"--