Album of Thirty Actor Prints
Original title: Album of Thirty Actor Prints
kurzbeschreibung
Thirty woodblock prints by Utagawa Kunisada are gathered in this 19th-century album, printed in ink and colour on paper. What they record are Kabuki performances: actors caught in sharpened, expressive poses.
Description
Three men sit at a table while, off to the side, a kneeling woman is pressed by a figure with a drawn sword. Everyone wears traditional Japanese dress. Blue, pink, white and grey carry the colour scheme; light falls evenly across the surface, with no hard shadows. The arrangement works as a mirror image, the group of men on the left, the woman and her assailant on the right. Crisp contours and flat, closed areas of colour are what one expects from a Japanese woodblock print.
Context
Utagawa Kunisada, born in 1786 and dead in 1865, ranked among the most prolific and commercially successful woodblock artists of the Edo period. He became famous for his yakusha-e, portraits of Kabuki actors. This album dates from the 19th century, when such sheets found great favour with the urban public and were eagerly collected.
Impact
A tense theatrical situation comes through, the kind that belongs to Kabuki. The mirrored layout and the clear planes of colour give the sheet a calm yet articulate presence that draws the eye into the stage world of Japanese theatre.
Technique
Colours were applied to woodblocks and transferred from there onto paper. This made possible the finest lines and the flat colouring that the ukiyo-e style demands. That thirty individual sheets are bound together into an album points to serial production and to the collecting character of these works.
AI-generated description text
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art · Public Domain (CC0 1.0)