Views of ‘Hiroshige: Visions of Japan’

Two hundred years ago, Dutch merchants opened shipments of porcelain from Japan to find the packing material was delicate rice paper, printed with brightly colored scenes of Japanese life. When the prints arrived, it didn’t take long for some of the artists behind them to be recognized as masters. Mass-produced from carved woodblocks, the images were known as ukiyo-e.

Today, the “images of the floating world” continue to be appreciated as more than so many little bits of paper. Not only did the prints influence the major figures of Impressionism, but their simple elegance is striking on its own merit.

To that end, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is launching an exhibition of ukiyo-e, titled “Hiroshige: Visions of Japan.” Utagawa Hiroshige was one of ukiyo-e’s most popular and revolutionary artists, renowned for his investigation of Japanese landscape, particularly the new newly urbanized Edo, present-day Tokyo.

“The whole movement that had been going on had been favoring beauties and sumo wrestlers,” said Christine Knoke, curator at the Norton Simon. “With the Tokaido Road series, it reinvigorated landscapes.”

Several prints from the series “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road” (1833), which depicts travelers between Edo and then-capital city Kyoto, are included in the exhibition. The road was well known and picturesque, and the multiple printings of the series established Hiroshige as an artist.

The images are brightly colored, often featuring a large object — a bird, a tree or even a mountain in the foreground, with an expansive background extending out to the horizon.

Originally, the printmakers used only India ink, but by the mid-19th century, prints were multicolored and often quite vibrant. Printmakers would sometimes dip the blocks in ink several times to bring out a fully saturated color. Those colors, intricate details and use of perspective give the small prints, which tend to be only about 9 inches by 16 inches, a great sense of depth.

“A lot of the Impressionists in France and America were very much taken by this revolutionary sense of composition,” Knoke said. “It’s always fun to refer back to artists like Van Gogh who we know incorporated some of these compositional elements in their own work.”

Another key compositional element Hiroshige used was asymmetry — common in Japan but new to the Western aesthetic at the time. “The entire Japanese culture is about the beauty of asymmetry,” said Hirokazu Kosaka, artistic director at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo. He noted that the so-called father of Impressionism, Edward Degas, was among the many artists influenced by the Japanese use of asymmetry.

Kosaka characterized Hiroshige as the Norman Rockwell of 19th century Edo. Like Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations, Hiroshige’s work could be found in the homes of many Japanese people. The method of printing from woodblocks meant that many people could have works of art in their homes. The ease of production, combined with the delicate nature of rice paper, explains why the prints, which didn’t hold up well, were repurposed as packaging for their fateful trip from Japan to Europe.

The prints in this exhibition, though, came a different route (as do most prints in collections). The Norton Simon acquired about 70% of its ukiyo-e from the estate of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had traveled to Japan several times in the early 20th century, buying and later dealing hundreds of the prints.

As well as prints from the Tokaido Road series, the exhibition will feature a number of images from Hiroshige’s later series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (1857), which focused on his home city in scenes whose simplicity sometimes belies their subtle exposition of life in a city whose population had already topped 1 million.

samantha.page@latimes.com