Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s woodblock moonlit moments

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi is usually considered the last of the great exponents of ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s The moon and the helm of a boat, left, and The moon of Yamaki mansion.

A picture, according to the old proverb, is worth a thousand words. A quick sketch when trying to explain a complicated theory, a diagram in a set of instructions, logos and safety warnings readily illustrate the truth of this principle. Posters, advertising and propaganda are all predicated on the effectiveness and economy of visual communication.

From the beginning of the Christian church, images were used to tell the biblical stories and to illustrate Christ’s parables. The second commandment, however, explicitly prohibited the making of images of God, man or any living creature, and this injunction was observed by Jews and later Muslims. The early Christians, probably because they were addressing converts from cultures that were accustomed to painted and sculpted images, managed to ignore this rule, and in the Middle Ages the use of images was justified as a way of instructing the illiterate masses.

But how far do these images, even in a sequence, actually tell the story? We may look at a series of frescoes or mosaics illustrating the story of Genesis, for example, and admire the clarity of the articulation, but would the narrative be intelligible to anyone who was not already familiar with the subject? We can see the problem clearly when we first encounter such images from another tradition, for example paintings or carvings of the life of Buddha.

In the art of more recent centuries, history paintings most often refer to a relatively limited repertoire of well-known stories from mythology, scripture or history. Genre paintings, pictures of low-life, did not pose the same problems because they were made up of anecdotal observations without a specific narrative thread. In the 18th century, though, painters like Hogarth and Greuze tried to raise genre painting to a new level of seriousness in which tales of everyday life were charged with moral significance.

The trouble was that these pictures, for all their visual clues, could not really tell their stories unaided. The problem is even more apparent in the thousands of 19th-century genre pictures that attempt to inculcate a moral or to evoke the pathos of the lives of the poor: artists are obliged to resort to stock types and to scatter the compositions with sentimentally predictable and prominent clues. For all their ambitions, these pictures become banal puzzles that the viewer pieces together mechanically, rather than powerful images to strike the imagination.

Like reflections in the rice-paddies … (1887).

The truth is that pictures are not very good at telling stories we don’t already know. But they are very good at recalling ones that we do know, at making them striking, memorable and moving. And pictures are so good at this for the same reason they are not good at explicating a subject that we don’t already know: namely, that they can only represent a single moment.

Louis XIV’s official artist, Charles Le Brun, who painted the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, observed that le peintre n’a qu’un instant — the painter has only one instant. That makes it hard to convey the events that have led up to and may follow the scene represented if we are not familiar with the story, but it allows the painter to concentrate the viewer’s mind on a single dramatically pivotal or morally critical moment in a sequence of events that we already know.

And of course it allows the painter — or indeed the sculptor — to choose different moments from a sequence. Thus Donatello represents David after his victory over Goliath, Michelangelo before the encounter, and Bernini in the act of hurling the slingshot. It also allows for variations of framing and choices in setting and wider context: Poussin has the angry Moses about to break the tablets of the Commandments in the background of The Adoration of the Golden Calf (c. 1634) while Rembrandt chooses to focus on the single figure of Moses lifting the tablets aloft before shattering them (1659).

These were exactly the questions that concerned Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92), usually considered the last of the great exponents of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock prints that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. He was born in the last generation of the Edo period and lived through the turmoil that preceded the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of Japan’s radical process of modernisation — as well as the sporadic violence that followed, such as the Samurai Rebellion of 1877.

Yoshitoshi’s career unfolded, in these dramatic circumstances, not only through a profound transformation of Japanese political and social life but, just as significantly for an artist, through a period in which traditional styles and media were subjected to an unprecedented ­assault from the influences of Western art, ­photography and mass reproduction.

Nor was Yoshitoshi a phlegmatic individual who took all this in stride. By all accounts he was highly strung and prone to depression. His career was very uneven, too — both aggravating and aggravated by his personality — alternating between dramatic highs and lows, although he was apparently held in esteem in the later years of his life.

Yoshitoshi began as the pupil of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, from whom he learned the traditional art of ukiyo-e while also being exposed to reproductions of Western art. The European influence is discernible throughout his work, but especially and most overtly in his earlier work. One example, not included in this exhibition, is an 1873 print of a child reaching up to a young woman where the whole composition is borrowed from Raphael’s 1518 The Holy Family; equally interesting is how he has rendered the modelling of the face, reduced to two tones in the language of woodblock prints.

Ishiyama Moon from the series One hundred aspects of the moon (1889).

This was five years after the Meiji Restoration, and by this time Yoshitoshi had already achieved fame and success, lost everything during a period of depression and nervous breakdown, and then begun to rebuild his career. His early notoriety, in the years leading up to the Restoration, had come with the publication of a series of atrociously violent prints, graphically illustrating murder — often of women — decapitation and suicide. One shows a killer drinking blood from his victim’s severed neck.

The series exhibited here, One hundred aspects of the moon, represents the last phase of Yoshitoshi’s career and life, from 1885 to 1892, and could hardly be more different, both in avoiding violence and in being much less overtly indebted to Western art than some of his earlier work, in which he seems to have seized on anything, from baroque composition to naturalistic detail, that could make his images more surprising and sensational.

Here, on the contrary, he has reined in the European effects and assimilated them as part of a deeper renewal of his ukiyo-e style, which now appears more consistently Japanese. This tribute to traditional style is not fortuitous but part of Yoshitoshi’s broader purpose in the series, which is to preserve Japanese cultural traditions and cultural memory against the erosion of Westernisation and modernisation.

And this is where we can appreciate the subjects of the pictures, the stories he tells or recalls in these prints. They are drawn from a wide range of Japanese and Chinese traditions, from very old stories like the tale of Monkey — the subject of the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West and the memorable Japanese television series Monkey (1978-80) — to episodes from Japanese history, ghost stories, tales of monks and wise men, or scenes from Noh and kabuki plays.

The subjects from Japanese history are particularly significant, because at the very moment when traditional Japan is being swept aside, Yoshitoshi reminds his viewers of stories from the age of the shoguns — heroic military adventures, stories of courtly love, and the eternally popular themes of ghosts, spirits and magical shapeshifting demons. The stories drawn from Noh plays, like Sotoba Komachi, are particularly significant, as they are already stylised in the highly artificial idiom of traditional theatre: they are twice-told stories, wrapped in layers of recollection and narrative artifice.

In every case, the moment is all-important; and the moment he chooses is always intended not only to elicit drama and suspense, but to involve the viewer in completing the tale, forcing us to recall it, to tell it to ourselves, and thus to rehearse the memory of ancient traditions and preserve them from oblivion.

Sometimes there is a sense of overt urgency, as with a warrior who turns to defend himself from an attacker who appears only as a shadow on a paper shoji door. And there is a different kind of immediacy and tension in the picture of a voyeur peeping at a beautiful woman dressing on her balcony. The common motif of the moon, which gives the series its title, means all these subjects are nocturnes, belied by the brightness of the colours, but adding another layer of imaginative depth and mystery. In one poignant image, a young streetwalker, rolled-up mat at the ready, turns towards the autumn moon, which lights up her white painted face.

Often the suspense is not obvious. In one striking composition, a warrior plays the flute on the stern of his ship, in the silence of the moonlit night. It is with some shock that we realise that, aware of the fate that awaits him, he is about to drown himself in the waters below. In this and many other subjects the protagonist is a specific character from Japanese history, recalling episodes particularly from the turbulent and historically decisive 12th and 16th centuries: the young prince is Kiyotsune, to whom an oracle has revealed that his Taira clan is about to be crushed in battle (1185) by the Minamoto.

Other images go back deeper into Japanese historical memory, to the less political and more idyllic world of the Heian period, the age commemorated in The Tale of Genji, written at its zenith in the early 11th century. Indeed one of the prints seems to evoke the genesis of this story. Ishiyama moon shows a woman leaning over a low Japanese table and gazing out at the full moon, suspended between two mountain peaks represented in classic ink-painting style.

There is a tradition that the Genji no monogatari was composed at the Ishiyama temple, and the woman’s purple robe hints at the name of its author, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, for murasaki also means purple in Japanese. Here then we seem to see the author of the story imagining what she is about to write, thinking back to events that are meant to have taken place several centuries before her own time, engaged in the same kind of imaginative work of recollection and recovery of memory to which the viewer of these prints is also invited.

Yoshitoshi: One hundred aspects of the moon

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Until November 20.