Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1343202 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 333 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The carnivalesque urban culture of Japan's Edo period is captured in The Dawn of the Floating World 1650-1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the volume gathers many previously unpublished woodblock prints and paintings of pleasure quarters, actors, courtesans and streetscapes. The book is edited by Timothy Clark, a keeper in the British Museum's Japanese antiquities department; Dartmouth art history professor Allen Hockley; and Anne Nishimura Morse and Louise E. Virgin, curators of Japanese art at the MFA, Boston. Clark and Morse contribute essays on the development and collection of ukiyo-e art, respectively, and the book also includes biographies of the major artists of the period.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
For a recently concluded exhibition that aimed to examine precursors of the Ukiyo-e style, curators at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, drew works from the renowned collection of Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Examining screen paintings, pleasure quarters, Kabuki, puppet theater, and literature, curator Clark and his coauthors detail the cultural changes and stylistic developments that led up to this style, exemplified by the familiar views of Mt. Fuji and the "Great Waves" series. The text also explores technical advances in woodblock printing that allowed artists to produce and disseminate images quickly and cheaply. Key players in the development of the Boston collection are discussed, short biographies of many Ukiyo-e artists help to flesh out people and places, and a helpful chronology lists events in government, arts, and Kabuki. However, the bulk of the exhibition catalog presents full-page images of pieces, with descriptive text about each. This work and Katherine L. Blood's recent The Floating World of Ukiyo-e, a good overview of Ukiyo-e at its height, together provide strong coverage of the topic. Recommended for academic libraries and public libraries specializing in art history and Japanese culture. Nadine Dalton Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Boston's Museum of Fine Arts serves as a remarkable repository of Asian art, including a trove of Japanese paintings, prints, and books. Appearing in this volume are many rare works of art never before exhibited outside Boston associated with the early Ukiyo-e style, heralding Japan's Edo period. Vivid images offer telling glimpses of the so-called floating world, where prancing courtesans appear draped in richly patterned costumes, kabuki actors engage in swordplay to quell demons, and expansive views of street scenes unite bustling crowds, fashionable architecture, and distant landscapes. As cultural and historical documents, the Ukiyo-e woodblocks present a fascinating record of manners and mores. Embodied in the details are aristocratic elements, providing contrast to everyday objects. All together, depictions of idealized beauty reign amid vignettes of monks on pilgrimage and myths of ancient warriors portrayed in plays. Alice Joyce
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Customer Reviews

Only superlatives can do justice to this book.
Everything about "Dawn of the Floating World: Early Ukiyoe Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts" is superb: the quality of the unglazed paper, the beautiful design and color reproductions, and the solid scholarship that accompanies the presentation of rare Japanese prints from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

If you are a collector or student of Edo-period Japanese prints, you undoubtedly have dozens if not hundreds of books in your art library, but few will match the quality of this volume or give you access to such a rich lode of information on the earliest of the Japanese printmakers (1650-1765). Nor will many other books stand up to the quality of the text provided by an all-star team drawn from the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, and Dartmouth College. The text entries present: poems in romanized Japanese as well as English translation, aesthetic assessments of the prints, biographical information on artists, interpretations of symbolic devices, and details--where relevant--of the kabuki plays, actors, locations, and activities depicted. Even the footnotes, printed at the inner margins of the pages devoted to text, are fascinating and will help intellectually curious readers to readily locate the best of source material.