Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) is widely known as one of the most creative and influential artists of the ukiyo-e, those "pictures of the floating world" that delineated, in particular, the good looks of the women of Edo. These have, in fact, been called among the most accomplished and eloquent expressions of feminine beauty in Japanese art.
Along with this judgment is the assumption that Utamaro was there, picturing what he saw. His first foreign fan, Edmond de Goncourt, thought so. He believed that the artist spent his life amid the women he drew, that these were actually portraits of real people
But, as Julie Davis demonstrates in this closely reasoned study of the artist and his society, "they are a fictionalized view of an imagined world of pleasure, complicit in all that it entailed." There is enough evidence to establish that there really was an Utamaro, but the persona that has accrued about the name ought be more closely examined.
This is what Davis does. She reminds us that print-making was a collective process. Utamaro would submit a drawing to his publisher, the producer of the project. This, if approved, would be handed to the staff of block carvers and printers who would produce a work based upon this original drawing. Along the way the product could be manipulated in order to increase its salability.
Another contemporary artist, Katsushika Hokusai, wrote a famous letter to his publisher asking that the engraver remain closer to the original design and not indulge in features (nose, eyes) popularly considered more desirable. Utamaro, so far as is known, did not complain, if he had anything to complain about, and his persona eventually became as much a part of the package as the prints themselves.
He, in fact, says Davis, became a brand name. "The manufacture of Utamaro — as well as his subjects and the entire ukiyo-e project — also had political ramifications, for as he was being defined as the ultimate insider, he also became a manifested presence for so many who would remain outsiders in the political order of the day."
This occurred because there was a need for it. The publisher was interested in sales and held a number of ideological assumptions as well. By creating an Utamaro logo he could control it. Take, for example, the highly profitable charms of the Yoshiwara, Edo's licensed quarter.
"The superstructure of the quarter — the real-life economics of indentured servitude and commercialized sexuality — was made opaque by the fantasy spun around it . . ." writes Davis.
"Yoshiwara's illusions," she continues, "may have sustained the dream of release and separation from ordinary life, but from the beginning it was also directed to divert and exhaust money, time and energy, abating sexual as well as social tensions. It thus served those in power by distracting and disarming potential for political unrest. Yoshiwara participated in the choreography of social control so effectively executed under the shogunate."
Utamaro himself experienced just how draconian this could be in that police state known as Tokugawa Japan, when he was manacled for well over a month on the charge of showing the long dead Toyotomi Hideyoshi enjoying the same kind of female companionship that all of Edo had learned, from Utamaro as well as others, to envy.
Though there were doubtless further political reasons for such a sentence, the aim was perhaps directed more toward the persona than toward the person. Utamaro, no less than Chanel and Gucci in our own time, meant money-making and taste-forming to the dimensions of the product.
By offering this new approach to the constructions of identity, to the roles of gender, sexuality and celebrity in the Edo Period, Davis here makes a significant contribution to the field in showing us the constructed nature of "the spectacle of beauty."
In addition, her own publishers have done her proud. Reaktion Books are always beautifully designed and this one, with its full-color illustrations from all the Utamaro series, its art paper and its elegant binding is one of the best.
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