New Woodblock Print Exhibitions Open This Month

January 2020

New exhibitions of woodblock prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi open this month and next at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Dayton Art Institute and Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Recent exhibitions of his work were also shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University and Lafayette College.

Yoshitoshi is widely considered to be the most important Japanese woodcut artist of the Meiji period (1868-1912), and is credited with reviving the ukiyo-e genre at a time when Western technology threatened to replace woodblock printing. He made use of Western colors and inks for dramatic effect, yet stayed loyal to the woodblock print techniques of his predecessors (including Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Kikuchi Yōsai, with both of whom he studied).

A woodblock print created by ukiyo-e artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

Yoshitoshi’s early designs included traditional subjects - actors, beautiful women and historical scenes - but he also documented the violent turmoil of the Meiji Restoration, a period of rapid industrialization that marked the end of the feudal shogunate and the opening of Japan to the rest of the world. He was eventually recruited by newspapers (which were new at the time) to illustrate current events.

Many of Yoshitoshi’s prints address topics of war, and some of his work depicts gory murders and supernatural occurrences. His later prints focused on subjects from the past, and defied the trends of Westernization that were transforming Japan.

“Samurai, Ghosts, and Lovers,” a new exhibition at The Dayton Art Institute (opening 2/22), features Yoshitoshi's complete woodblock series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, which achieved widespread popularity. Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive's “Brave Warriors and Fantastic Tales” (opening 1/15) offers prints from both One Hundred Aspects of the Moon and Yoshitoshi's supernatural series Thirty-Six Ghosts. And the Minneapolis Institute of Art's exhibition “Yoshitoshi: Master Draftsman Transformed” (opening 2/1) features 43 works that highlight the artist’s process, his innovative skills as a draftsman, and his responses to Japan’s changing culture.