"Hiroshige: the views of Tokaido or the moral geometry of a master" by Eric Mircher

[This is a continuation of my translations of Eric Mircher's original articles.  Please read this introduction for the background behind this project.]

The master of the Japanese woodblock print is having his first Parisian exhibition at the Pinacothèque de Paris.  The Pinacothèque is a temporary exhibitions gallery, which opened in its current location at the Place de la Madeleine in 2007.  Despite the disdain that certain in the Parisian museum circles felt for its director, Marc Ristellini, a talented and successful businessman who was treading on “their” sacred ground, specifically, the sacrosanct city-museum that is Paris, the success of the Pinacothèque is undeniable.  Its exhibitions have been pertinent and novel.  The space itself is not completely adapted to showing art, having been converted from a building that formerly housed the luxury grocer Fauchon, but the numbers don't lie, the viewing public is flocking to its exhibitions.

The Utagawa Hiroshige exhibition, his name meaning “studio of my own amusement”,  at the Pinacothèque, repairs a great injustice to the Japanese master, who is only now getting his first retrospective in France thanks to a loan of his work from the Leiden Museum.  The exhibition presents in chronology Hiroshige's work and includes the famous series of prints that Hiroshige created describing the different views of the Tokaido Road, views of inland and coastal roads taken during the journey from Edo (known today as Tokyo) to Kyoto.  In the West, one is more familiar with the artist Hokusai and his famous views of Mount Fuji, so quintessential it seems to the Western view Japanese culture.  In Japan, however, Hiroshige is held in just as high esteem, as the views and landscapes that he created are truly emblematic of his time.

The exhibition shows what recent research has confirmed, the 53 Stations of the Tokaido by Hiroshige, printed originally in 1833-1834, were not all based on first-hand observation.  In fact,  as Kerouac on his imaginary road, Hiroshige described his world and his culture through close observations done at home in Edo, and also freely used as reference illustrations taken from a travel guide, the “Kisoji Meisho Zue,” published in 1805.  Thus, the station of Shinagawa showing the departure of Daimyo, a local prince, and the different stations depicting the work of local laborers, were truly the fruits of the imagination of an artistic genius.

There are other reasons that Hiroshige became the master of the Utagawa tradition of printmaking in Japan.

In his prints, Hiroshige shows a very subtle balance between the linear perspective imported recently from the West into Japan, and the assimilated age-old practices of atmosphere culled from traditional Chinese painting.  Japanese culture is characterized by this ability to assimilate from outside cultures in order to create a very specific art all its own that generates its own tradition.  Hiroshige demonstrates so admirably this immense capacity of assimilation and origination.

In his prints, Hiroshige represents in equilibrium people—almost as if they were insects—and the mineral world, the universe of vegetation and the bodies of water in and by which they live.  One can speak of moral geometry here.  There is a certain philosophy of joy that emanates from these views of the land of the Rising Sun.  People are confronted by the majesty of the power and the danger of nature (“Wada”,  the 29^th of the 69 views of Kisokaido Road), but all accidents seem to have a fair and happy ending (“Sudden downpour at Shona”, the 53^rd station of Tokaido).  People are not free from temptation, there are views of neighborhoods for pleasure and commerce, but society is depicted in its totality, as a single entity whose rules that are imposed on royalty, like Prince Daimyo, as well as on simple porters and laborers.  Everyone has a place and assumes fully that position.  Before the power of nature, people come together to organize a society where work and pleasure co-mingle and where each moment is full of life, and favorable to both work and rest.  It's a picaresque novel of images that is not overwrought and pedantic in face of the truly powerful forces that are often menacing incarnated in mountains, in bodies of water, in forests.  These views are simply the recipe for joy.

The scenes of Hiroshige recall the belief that the person who is able to find balance between himself and the world is a “man of tea,” as described by Okakura Kakuzo in his Book of Tea.  This person lives far from the disequilibrium that is so contrary to the thinking of Shintoism.  Looking at these views by Hiroshige, as a Westerner, and no doubt as a Japanese person, one has a great sense of nostalgia, for this balance between people and nature, which seems to still to have been preserved until the arrival of our industrial societies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The last great series of prints of the master, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, presented at the end of the exhibition, shows what imbalance creates.  Seeing this late work, one feels that the master, living in a country that had embarked on a program of full-scale change and modernization, began to adapt to a more western vision and perspective.  He created powerful visual images that surprised  but which also inverted the traditional value system of balance.  The relationship between people and their environment became more predatory and narcissistic, and the latter at the price of realism.  And so even the wise fail.

The success of printmaking during Hiroshige's life is also a fascinating sub-narrative of the exhibition.  Hiroshige's work embodied both popular success and artistic revolution.  In each of the prints, there is a meeting of the individuality of art and its reproducibility in multiples.  Hiroshige throughout his working life acknowledged in his work the engravers and printers who worked with him, their names were often inscribed on storefronts and restaurants depicted in his prints.  This is something that was completely novel for his time.  

A very beautiful and unique pencil sketch is shown in the exhibition.  Through this, one begins to understand the chain of production implicated in the production of these prints.  The artist upstream traces the general idea and this is followed by craftsmen who complete the original drawing.  This drawing is then transformed by engravers into woodblocks that ultimately give the subtle and complex interplay of impressions and colors seen when the image is finally printed on paper.  There is no break in coherence between the artists and the craftsmen that help in the finalization of the work. This cooperation is often represented in the prints of Hiroshige: a group of people traveling together towards a common goal.  Here again, is another lesson one can draw from these prints of nearly two hundred years of age finally being shown together in Paris for the first time.

• Article written by Eric Mircher
• (Translated from French by Roy Forget)