one of the most unexpected places where we saw japanese woodblock prints was at frank lloyd wright's fallingwater last april 2014. fallingwater is a home built partly over a waterfall that wright designed for the kaufman family in 1935 forty-five miles outside of pittsburgh. little did i know, but it turns out that wright was a dealer in the japanese art, and during his insolvent periods, including the time he was designing the imperial hotel in tokyo, his japanese art side business helped save his architecture practice during its less solvent periods, and practically financed taliesins 1 & 2.
so i decided to do a little digging online and recently finished andreas marks' japan journeys: famous woodblock prints of culture sights in japan.
the earliest surviving examples of woodblock prints from china date back to 200, when it was used as a method of printing on cloth. however, in japan, the earliest known woodblock printing dates from 764 when an empress commissioned one million small pagodas containing short printed scrolls to be distributed to temples.
ukiyo-e (浮世絵), which literally translates to "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of woodblock prints and paintings that flourished in japan from the 17th through 19th centuries. among the most popular depictions were beautiful women, kabuki actors and sumor wrestlers, travel scenes and landscapes, and flora and fauna.
through the introductions and prints in marks' book, i was able to learn a little bit more about the culture and history of japan. as many of the subjects of the woodblock print makers are often major cities and sites in japan, it felt very much like i was quickly reliving some of my adventures in japan, in woodblock print.
here is a photo of perhaps one of the most iconic woodblock prints by katsushika hokusai, the great wave off kanagawa.
and through a little research online, i also happily learned that the brooklyn art museum has an extensive collection of utagawa hiroshige's one hundred famous views of edo.
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