The Floating World

Now that the dust of war had settled, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum could drag out the priceless Japanese prints it acquired in 1936, and had never displayed. On exhibit last week, the Met's 339 Uki-yoye ("pictures of the floating world") were new proof that no one ever beat the Japanese at printmaking.

Before Perry opened Japan to the West, the average Jap was a connoisseur who bought the best colored block prints for a few pennies each, as Americans of the day bought Currier & Ives. Ukiyoye, like the Currier & Ives, were mostly genre scenes and tourist views, but the similarity ended there. Glowed the New York Sun's scholarly art critic Henry McBride, after seeing the Met's collection: "It is difficult to think of any other people in any other age who maintained so high a standard in 'popular' art."

Hokusai, first of the early 19th Century Japanese masters to make landscape his main theme, earned barely enough to live on, though the public thought much more of Ms work than he did. "At the age of six," he once remarked, "I had a passion for reproducing form . . . but even at 70 I had little skill. Only at 73 did I begin to understand how rightly to represent animals, birds, insects, fish, plants. At 90 I shall be better, at 100 I shall be sublime; at no I shall give life to every line, to every dot. Let no one mock at these words."

No one did, though Hokusai died at 89. He left behind him thousands of haunting, crystal-clear landscapes which illustrated poems scrawled across their skies.

The second star of the Metropolitan's show was Hiroshige, who was born 37 years after Hokusai. His work ended the golden age of Japanese prints and started a new era in Western art. His prints, frequently used in wrapping tea for export to Europe, exerted an influence on Manet, Whistler, Degas, and Van Gogh.

Orphaned when he was 13, Hiroshige immediately took over his father's post as a Tokyo fireman. Between fires he taught himself brush drawing. Hiroshige's later prints rivaled even Hokusai's for force of feeling, showed exactly how close art can come to nature without being naturalistic.

At 51 Hiroshige shaved his head, became a Buddhist novice. But he kept on traveling and making prints of the sights of Japan (Thirty-Six Views of Fuji, etc.). Eleven years later, mortally sick with cholera, the master wrote a cheerful poem to celebrate his departure to the Buddhist Heaven:

I leave my brush at Azuma;

I go to the Land of the West on a journey,

To view the famous sights there.

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