ART: PRIVATE VIEW
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Your support makes all the difference.Japanese Prints - Images of the Floating World Barry Davies Oriental Art, London W1
This exhibition of 215 Japanese woodblock prints from the collection of David Caplan, an American picture dealer from Japan, presents the story of Japanese art before and after the familiar landscapes of Hiroshige and Hokusai. The exhibition starts in the 17th century and spans 250 years to the 1920s, frequently dwelling on the Japanese love of erotic art - and some of them are very rude indeed. It's splendid stuff for a winter's day.
Of course, the famous works of Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai are well represented (there are 53 prints by Hiroshige alone) but the real joy of the show is in the less familiar, often earlier works such as Suzuki Hanurobi's image A Couple on a Boat. This startlingly modern depiction of a fisherman's fumblings in the bottom of his boat is a strange contradiction of image and technique - the man's indelicate clambering heightened in its clumsiness by the unbelievably fine lines of the printing, especially that of the net that hangs over the boat like a veil. It's a wonderful print, made in the middle of the 18th century, and all the more extraordinary when one thinks of it alongside the sort of work that was being made at the same time in the West.
Japanese Prints - Images of the Floating World, Barry Davies Oriental Art, 1 Davies St, London W1 (0171-408 0207) ends Fri
Richard Ingleby
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