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Museum And Gallery

Stillness

QUIET ACTIVITY: "Ryogoku Bridge and the Great Riverbank" by Hiroshige.

There’s a small jewel of a show nestled into a side gallery of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick. It’s filled with Japanese prints that arrest and hold the viewer’s attention as surely as any works of art from any period or any culture.

These are ukiyo-e woodblock prints, pictures of the "floating world" that were mostly made between the late 17th and early 20th centuries. The prints were made for the popular market and were affordable enough for successful townsmen of the Edo and early Meiji periods. The floating world was the subculture of brothels and entertainment palaces, and the subjects were often courtesans and, as the craft developed, landscapes and depictions of sumo wrestlers and kabuki actors.

Pictures of courtesans and their entertainments were sometimes used as a catalog from which the client could anticipate the character of his upcoming diversion. In "Courtesans in a Brothel" by Yoshiiku, from about 1870, a group of women in elaborately-patterned dress sit so closely to one another that their costumes nearly blend together. Above and behind them the edge of a roof surrounding a courtyard extends at a sharp angle down toward the right side of the picture, anchoring the visually busy group while indicating these artists had learned perspective from Western art.

The centerpiece of the show is a scroll of some 80 of Hiroshige’s classic “Hundred Famous Views of Edo.” These prints were made toward the end of Hiroshige’s life, between 1856 and 1859. The last few were issued after the artist’s death in a cholera epidemic in 1858. Hiroshige had never been financially successful in his lifetime, which no doubt drove his prolific output. The “Hundred Views” had been paid for up-front. Nowadays he is reckoned one of the greatest of the ukiyo-e artists. Van Gogh copied at least two of the “Views” directly.

The pigments used in these prints are subject to fading in direct light, so the museum will be unrolling the scroll over the course of the show. A different half-dozen or so of the prints will be visible each week. According to curatorial assistant Kacy Karlen, who selected the show from the museum’s permanent collection, the scroll was an unusual way for these prints to be collected. The museum staff will be lifting the prints from the scroll after the show so they can be stored and eventually exhibited individually.