The images book-ending the beginning and end of this post are from an exhibit opening this week at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Made In Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement. It will be on exhibit April 29 - August 9, 2005. There is a elegant little catalogue, with essays by Alicia Volk and my colleague at MIAD, Helen Nagata.
The harbinger of Sosaku hanga ("creative print") artists in the west, Pulitzer-Prize winning author and patron of Japanese prints, James Michiner - who knew? - seems to have served in part as a bridge between them and the tradition known as ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"). Of course that bridge was already there for the Sosaku hanga artists - who had built it themselves by looking back and referencing ukiyo-e, as the curatorial essays adeptly point out.
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