Fleeting charms of Ukiyo-e from the Museum of Fine Arts

SHEPPARTON is a long way from the Yoshiwara pleasure district of old Edo, as Tokyo was known during the Tokugawa shogunate.

Kitagawa Utamar

SHEPPARTON is a long way from the Yoshiwara pleasure district of old Edo, as Tokyo was known during the Tokugawa shogunate and before the Meiji Restoration in 1868 - far from the floating world of actors and courtesans and tea-house girls who were the favourite subjects of the colour woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, which flourished above all in the 18th and 19th centuries and fascinated the impressionists and their contemporaries.

But Shepparton is also a long way from Melbourne and one may wonder what an exhibition of this outstanding quality is doing so far from a metropolitan centre. Conversely, it is greatly to the credit of the Shepparton Art Museum to have obtained it, an achievement that once again emphasises the superiority of Victoria's regional galleries over those of NSW.

In the past few years, galleries in Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Mornington Peninsula have mounted exhibitions of national significance, often with international participation, and equally often drawing on their own collections, supported in many cases by loans from the National Gallery of Victoria or the State Library: photography, printmaking, drawing, scientific illustration, surveys of aspects of art history in Victoria, even monographic exhibitions on secondary but substantial figures in Australian art, from Nicholas Chevalier to Michael Shannon.

In the same period, how many exhibitions worth visiting have been shown in NSW galleries outside Sydney -- let alone exhibitions originating in these galleries? The problem no doubt has its roots in the history of the states. Regional Victoria was enriched by the gold rush, and cities such as Ballarat and Bendigo built art museums and acquired significant collections that are a pleasure to visit in their own right. Such collections in turn justified the employment of real curators, as well as a program of acquisitions and exhibitions; and all this was the basis for a meaningful relationship with the NGV as the mother institution of Victorian galleries.

In NSW, although some regional galleries have real collections and proper museum staff, the culture in most cases seems to be fundamentally different; too many seem more like community cultural centres than galleries or museums, and their staff members are more like council employees than curators. They have neither the collections nor the expertise to mount shows of great significance, so it is hardly surprising that, when they are not hosting a touring exhibition, they can end up with little interest beyond the region itself.

A few weeks ago I discussed what was meant to be the new vision for the future of the Art Gallery of NSW. I suggested a real vision for the future might begin by reallocating Sydney's major art collections between the AGNSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Another part of a real vision for the gallery would be to build a stronger relationship with the regional galleries of NSW: this could involve semi-permanent loans to some of these galleries -- just as in France many works from the national collection have been allocated to important regional galleries -- which would build the permanent holdings of these institutions. Perhaps staff could be seconded to support the development of a deeper museological culture. With such fostering, these regional galleries eventually could be in a position to originate exhibitions of quality themselves. And the AGNSW could more than double its effective footprint.

But to return to Shepparton, the ukiyo-e exhibition ended up here through a combination of initiative on the part of the director and extraordinary natural circumstances. The works belong to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has the most important collection of Japanese prints outside Japan, acquired a little more than a century ago as a gift from William Bigelow, who had bought them in Japan in the 1880s: his gift still represents more than half the museum's present holdings of 50,000 items. A selection of these works toured Japan and was seen there by SAM director Kirsten Paisley; but it was only when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami forced the Sendai museum to pull out that the Sendai timeslot was able to reallocated to Shepparton.

It is quite disconcerting to think such a tragic event brought us these works that evoke lightness, illusion and evanescent pleasure, areas of sensibility partly represented in Europe by Antoine Watteau and partly by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was himself influenced by Japanese prints. Such an art can flourish only in social circumstances not overshadowed by dramatic historical events, and the art of ukiyo-e too, though quintessentially Japanese, belongs to a particular period in the nation's history, the prosperous and orderly world of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The deepest aesthetic instincts of the Japanese, the basis of their sense of design and of ceremony, go back many centuries. But this was a time when increasing wealth and leisure meant pleasures once reserved for the aristocracy became more widely accessible. There were attempts to curb the resulting indulgence and luxury, and this is how the Yoshiwara district of Edo was set aside as a kind of extraterritorial pleasure quarter where the normal rules largely were suspended.

The main personalities of this world seem to have become something like stars, and a new popular art form arose, first as simple woodblocks printed in black ink, celebrating especially its famous beauties and the kabuki actors who played both male and female roles. The demand for these initially inexpensive prints was great, and competition encouraged artists and publishers to venture into colour, even though this was far more complicated and resulted in more expensive prints, for each colour has to be cut as a separate woodblock, and the sheets must be printed with perfect registration. The most luxurious ones had their blank backgrounds dusted with mica powder to emulate the effect of painted screens.

This exhibition concentrates on three artists from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Torii Kiyonaga, Kitagawa Utamaro and Toshusai Sharaku, and many of the works will be new to audiences more familiar with early to mid-19th-century artists such as Katsushika Hokusai (c 1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), though readers may recall the fine Utamaro exhibition at the AGNSW in early 2010. This early period is considered by Japanese connoisseurs to be the golden age of the medium, hence the title of the exhibition.

The earliest of the artists presented is Kiyonaga, the first great exponent of bijin-ga, pictures of beautiful women. There is even an example of an image printed in black outline only to compare with another impression overprinted in areas of solid black and at least four colour blocks. Kiyonaga was responsible for introducing a new canon of proportions in which women were taller and more svelte than Japanese women usually are, and he went to great lengths to emphasise the whiteness of their complexion, introducing background washes of grey or pale yellow to provide a contrast so subtle that the device may pass unnoticed on a casual inspection.

Here, as indeed in any unfamiliar genre or style, but especially in those that cultivate precise and minimal effects of expression, patience and attentive looking are rewarded by seeing more and more nuances, not only of pictorial design but of psychological suggestion. What by European standards appear to be impassively composed features open to reveal the muted resonance of a complex inner life.

This is even truer, or perhaps slightly easier for us to perceive, in the work of Utamaro, the next great master in the tradition. One of his innovations, indeed, was to focus on the head and shoulders alone of a woman, as in the case of the beautiful Takashima Ohisa (1792-93), whose complexion is also enhanced by the pale wash background of the composition. She was a tea-house waitress rather than a courtesan, as we know from the inscription, although an edict of 1793 prohibited the publication of the names of women other than courtesans, and perhaps the greater subtlety of her expression corresponds to her more ambiguous status.

Utamaro's work was not confined to close-up portraits of women; at the opposite extreme of complexity there are works such as Santo Kyoden at a Daimyo's Mansion (1788-90), a triptych that is like a novel or at least a short story in which the daughter of the daimyo -- a feudal lord -- on the right panel watches the performance of a dancer in the central panel, accompanied by musicians on the left. The girl herself is chastely concealed from view behind a bamboo screen, although we are allowed to see behind the screen; and all of this is in the middleground, while the foreground is occupied by incidents like subplots: a woman seems to be making an assignation with the eponymous Kyoden on the left, an aristocratic lady is greeted by attendants in the centre, and a couple of other young women engage in a Sapphic flirtation on the right, hinting at what really goes behind the screen of chastity.

Sharaku, an artist about whom we know little, introduces us to another level of experience. His subjects are mostly actors, and especially the male actors who played female parts -- onnagata -- and who in their youth were often boy prostitutes. But Sharaku pictures them in middle age, slightly grotesque after a life in drag but capable of touching pathos; they reminded me forcefully of an all-male performance of Yukio Mishima's Five Modern No Plays in Paris many years ago, in Marguerite Yourcenar's French translation and directed by Maurice Bejart, one of the most vivid theatrical experiences I can recall.

Like the others, but perhaps even more strikingly, Sharaku has a sense of dynamic posture, of the body in motion, and of the most characteristic and memorable inflexion of an attitude that clearly influenced Toulouse-Lautrec, particularly in his posters, where it adds a stylised artificiality to the natural feeling for movement already evident in his paintings and drawings. As in Lautrec's case, but still more profoundly, the art of ukiyo-e proves even a popular medium can achieve greatness if pursued with sufficient skill and refinement.

The Golden Age of Colour Prints: Ukiyo-e from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Shepparton Art Museum, until June 2.