Both kabuki and ukiyo-e came to an abrupt end in the 1890’s. As enthusiasm for new visual media pushed woodblock prints into the cultural past, so the desire to see the performances and the actors themselves waned. Uniquely it seems, in Japan, two very different media – theatre and visual art – made such a strong cultural bond in the minds of the people that one could not exist without the other.
With that termination, kabuki itself ceased to be a vital part of the metropolitan cultural scene.
There were no walls as such suitable for hanging pictures and no gold frames to act as windows onto another reality. Woodblock prints were designed to be held in the hand, passed around, held up to raking light or stored in albums.
There was no tradition there of framing (literal or metaphorical) art could be made on long scrolls which were unravelled like the cells on a reel of movie film – time here being progressive. In Japanese art, realism and representation were not necessarily dominant in a picture. Theirs was an art of the mind, of the imaginative, whereby the rules governing representation were infinitely flexible.
For the Japanese, space was flexible… linear, narrative, imagined… real and unreal. In the Japanese tradition, the key elements of western painting (and hence photography) were absent. This enabled a seamless transition from the tropes of painting into the design… the look, of the new technology. With the invention of photography proper, the relationship between image and reality – the window onto the world – was already firmly established. These inventions were a kind of halfway house to real photography, the difference being that the projected image was hand drawn rather than fixed automatically. Easel painting, almost from its inception in the middle ages used devices, sometimes called camera obscura, to establish perspective and proportion in pictures.
The history of art and photography in the west is long and complicated. That and the ironic and still irreconcilable urge to be anti-bourgeois and yet produce objects of immense monetary value. It had its roots in the romantic tradition… in the central role of the artist – the genius – the embodiment of a solitary, visionary talent. Literariness, as opposed to literalness became the dominant theme of western culture from the turn of the century until the present day. The preoccupations of the European painters of the late nineteenth century were not the result of anxiety borne of technological competition – far more affecting was the desire among younger artists to create a vital art that was intellectual as much as visual in its impulse. This is an easy, if simplistic rationale. A common explanation for the development of modernism is the rapid pre-eminence of photography across all genres in European painting at the start of the twentieth century. This tragedy, that affected Japan, is more acute than comparable transitions in western art of the same period. There is an unfolding tragedy in this crossover from woodblock to photographic portraits. There’s a huge difference here, between these two art forms despite the identical subject matter and in some cases the same sitters despite the same visual language employed (the three-quarter length portrait) and the fact that mere decades separate one piece from another. Other pictures on this page show photographs of the nineteenth century kabuki stage stars, in role and in poses derived from their illustrious and outstanding forbears – the kamigata-e: the actor woodblock print. The current show at the Toshidama Gallery contains several carved-images-to-be-worshipped, that is, woodblock prints of kabuki actors from a period when idolatry and the kabuki stage were never far apart. I’m being a little disingenuous with the title of this piece… there’s an intended pun on gravure (from relief printing) and the idea of a graven image (something carved and to be worshipped) – the word is also used in modern Japan to describe fashion models, as in gravure idol. Ichikawa Danjuro IX as the Priest Mongaku