The Utagawa school, founded in the 18th century and active throughout the 19th, dominated all Japanese print production. It decided the genres and controlled the economics. It was responsible for half of all extant prints and hired hundreds of designers who worked under the Utagawa name.
These included many of the big-name stars. Among them was Utagawa Toyoharu, who established the school, Toyohiro and Toyokuni, Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada, Yoshitoshi, Kawanabe Kyosai, and many others.
The influence of the Utagawa school is unmatched. It created stylistic traditions that evolved from one generation to the next. It formed a highly organized system of production that enabled its artists to succeed in every genre. Through its network of artists, cutters, printers, and apprentices, it practiced collaboration and name-granting. The Utagawa "brand-name" was market-domineering and cut deeply into the competition. Print-making was big business. There were nearly four thousand publishers involved during the Edo period (1615-1968) and between 1705 and 1940 nearly 300 million impressions of various print types were produced.
This argues for sophisticated systems of procurement, production, distribution and marketing. As Laura Mueller has observed; "These variables continued to form an extremely competitive environment driven by strong market forces and changing fashions, where aesthetic considerations were often secondary to commercial ones."
The school even began publishing how-to books such as Toyokuni's "Quick Instruction in the Drawing of Actor Likenesses," which advised the workers as to approved house style. This much displeased the competition. Hokusai, the most formidable rival to the Utagawa brand, wrote his publisher giving instructions for those who actually cut his wood-print blocks (he only drew the original picture) to avoid those type of eyes and noses "that are at present in fashion," adding: "I don't like them at all."
Like them or not, the Utagawa style was here to stay and led to a kind of vocabulary where each artist could share, as it were, a collective consciousness where the properly popular eye or ear or nose could be chosen and assigned, where manner became a selling point.
Such artistic enterprises are also seen in the West. Rubens and Van Dyke as well as many less well-selling artists, had their own painting factories and even now critics remain divided on the question of just how much the presumed artist actually painted of this picture or that.
A closer parallel might be seen in The Factory, Andy Warhol's financially successful art workshop. Just as the Japanese woodblock print was not actually "made" by Hiroshige or Kuniyoshi, but by skilled workers (cutters, printers) who were hired to follow the original intentions, so with Warhol. He never "made" anything himself and there is now an Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board which issues authenticity certificates.
What is authenticated is that the original idea was Warhol's and that he approved the finished product. This certificate functions in somewhat the same manner as the publishers' logos on Japanese prints. It is tangible proof of an intangible and becomes important when a single surviving print brings enormous profit to the seller and when one of Warhol's Brillo boxes ("real" or "faked," though all are by definition faked) sells for up to $100,000.
Big money is never very far away behind high art and this beautifully designed, splendidly illustrated, and rather expensive volume is as much the history of a business as it is a delineation of aesthetics.
The featured prints are all from the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, and this is the catalog published for last year's Chazen exhibition, one which can be seen from March 21 through June 15 this year at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
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