Kitagawa Utamaro

Kitagawa Utamaro was born around 1753, probably in Edo. He trained under the ukiyo-e artist Toriyama Sekien and became the preeminent painter of bijin-ga — pictures of beautiful women — in the Japanese tradition. He worked primarily in woodblock prints and illustrated books, and his close collaboration with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who also published Hokusai, shaped the most productive period of his career. His women are his subject and his argument. Where the Western portrait tradition depicted women as idealized surfaces — the skin, the hair, the clothes, the available gaze — Utamaro depicted them with psychological interiority. His prints show women reading, writing, nursing, dressing, thinking. They are absorbed in what they are doing. They do not perform for the viewer. In his famous series of ōkubi-e — close-up bust portraits — the expressions are specific and individualized in a way that has no precedent in the Western portraiture of the same period. He also made shunga, which was a standard part of any serious ukiyo-e artist's practice. His erotic prints are technically accomplished, depicting bodies with the same formal attention he brought to his portraiture. The women in his shunga are as psychologically present as the women in his bijin-ga — a continuity that distinguishes his work from erotic traditions that reduce the figure to a body without a face. In 1804, the Tokugawa government prosecuted him for a triptych depicting the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, considered insufficiently respectful to the ruling order. He was placed in handcuffs for fifty days — a significant punishment for an artist of his standing. He died two years later, in 1806. His influence on European art arrived via Japonisme: Toulouse-Lautrec in particular absorbed his compositions and his interest in depicting women in private, unperformed moments. Edgar Degas's bathing scenes are in direct conversation with what Utamaro had been doing in Edo a century earlier.

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