Rising Sun, Falling Rain: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts

Rising Sun, Falling Rain presents some sixty prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts’ rich collection of ukiyo-e—pictures of the floating world— produced mostly in Edo (now Tokyo) from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The exhibition will feature works by such celebrated ukiyo-e artists as Katsukawa Shunshō, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, and Kawase Hasui, among others. At the time of their production, these prints were primarily collected by “chōnin” (or “townspeople”)— the rising class of artisans and merchants within the strictly hierarchical four-class system of the Edo period, headed by samurai and farmers. Particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prints catered to the townspeople’s interest in the licensed entertainment quarters and their actors and courtesans.

From their beginnings, prints captured the rapidly changing popularity of entertainers, whose clothing and hair fashion trends were followed by the public. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increased government restrictions forced print publishers to abandon prurient or frivolous subjects and to commission new themes from their artists. This fueled the production of views of famous places as well as illustrations from history, ghost tales, or novels translated from Chinese. Nineteenth-century town and landscape scenes by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige reached Europe soon after Japan signed treaties with Western countries in the mid-1850s, influencing fine and applied arts in both Europe and North America through the turn of the century.

The Grunwald Center’s collection of Japanese prints ranges from early outline-printed hand-colored images in various paper formats dating to the mid-eighteenth century, to late nineteenth-century works printed on standardized sheet sizes with elaborate imported dyes that appeared after the end of samurai rule. The exhibition allows visitors to discover Japan’s remarkable print industry through some of its greatest publishers and artists, and to understand the evolution of print technology between the 1730s and the 1930s.

Rising Sun, Falling Rain: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts is guest curated by Hollis Goodall with Kelin Michael, LUCE/Getty curatorial fellow.