ARTICLE: Epics and Erotica From a Grandfather of Anime
Looks like a very cool exhibit that also gives some context to anime and comic art..
From the April 15, 2010 New York Times
ART REVIEW
Epics and Erotica From a Grandfather of Anime
Victoria and Albert Museum
Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s 1843 Earth Spider triptych was seen as a satire on puritanical reforms.
Today’s comic book artists and graphic novelists owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hokusai, Hiroshige and other Japanese artists who, with wonderful formal and technical ingenuity, illustrated tales of martial conflict, high seas adventure, travel and erotica, and sold them cheap in vast quantities to the pre-20th-century equivalents of manga and anime fans.
At the Japan Society “Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi From the Arthur R. Miller Collection,” an exhibition of richly colorful scenes by one of the most popular 19th-century masters of woodblock printing, shows us what the fuss was about.
The exhibition was organized by Timothy Clark, head of the Japanese section of the British Museum, for the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where it appeared in 2009. The 130-plus prints in it are mostly from a collection of nearly 2,000 Kuniyoshi prints amassed by Arthur R. Miller, a lawyer and legal scholar who teaches at the New York University School of Law. A winner of two Emmy awards for hosting law-related television programs, Mr. Miller plans to donate his collection to the British Museum, where it is now on loan.
Check the full article here.
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