Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered (Freer/Sackler Museum)

EXHIBITION: Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered

 April 8, 2017–July 9, 2017
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The Smithsonian Institution has two museums of Asian art: the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened to the public in 1923, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which welcomed its first visitors in 1987. Both are physically connected by an underground passageway and ideologically linked through the study, exhibition, and sheer love of Asian art.

In 2014, the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, made an announcement that startled the art world. The new arts center revealed it had discovered a long-lost painting by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), a legendary but mysterious Japanese artist.
Titled Snow at Fukagawa, the immense work is one of three paintings by Utamaro that idealize famous pleasure districts in Edo (now Tokyo).

 Snow at Fukagawa 

198.8 by 341.1 centimetres (78.3 in × 134.3 in)

This trio reached the Paris art market in the late 1880s and was quickly dispersed. Museum founder Charles Lang Freer acquired Moon at Shinagawa in 1903. Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara passed through several hands in France until the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, purchased it in the late 1950s. And Snow at Fukagawa had been missing for nearly seventy years before it resurfaced in Hakone.

Moon at Shinagawa 

147.4 by 321 centimetres (58 in × 126 in)

 

Cherry Blossoms at Yoshiwara 

186.7 by 256.9 centimetres (73.5 in × 101.1 in)

For the first time in nearly 140 years, these paintings reunite in Inventing Utamaro at the Freer|Sackler, the only location to show all three original pieces. Contextualizing them within collecting and connoisseurship at the turn of the twentieth century, the exhibition explores the many questions surrounding the paintings and Utamaro himself.

Wiki Page

Looking at how these places relate to modern day Tokyo.

A small section of the exhibition this year

 

Exhibition curators James Ulak and Julie Nelson Davis presenting the exhibits (8mins)

Inventing Utamaro: A Conversation with the Curators(67mins)

 

A enlightening presentation from Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University on the lives of women under the Shognate during this period - How did the sex trade transform communities in early modern Japan? Which social and economic forces shaped the lives of the women who worked in pleasure districts such as the Yoshiwara? Join Julie Nelson Davis, co-curator of Inventing Utamaro and Amy, to learn about the reality behind the elegant courtesans in Kitagawa Utamaro’s paintings.

 VIDEO: Beyond Images of Beauty: Women’s Lives in Edo-Period Japan

Amy Stanley is a historian specializing in early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in women's/gender history and global history. Her first book, Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan, explores how an expanding market for sex transformed the Japanese economy and changed women’s lives between 1600 and 1868. Stanley has also written about adultery in the Edo period, education for geisha in the first years of the Meiji era, and the figure of the migrant maidservant in global history.

Map of Yoshiwara 1846

The Main Gate Yoshiwara early 1900s