NEW YORK, NY.- If you want to understand the visual language of Instagram, cinema, Tintin comics, modern poster design or Vincent van Gogh, the quickest thing to do would be to ride out to the Brooklyn Museum, where, for the first time in 24 years, you can see every one of Utagawa Hiroshiges 100 Famous Views of Edo (the city now known as Tokyo).
If youre unfamiliar with this monument of mid-19th-century Japanese woodblock art that, like Katsushika Hokusais 36 Views of Mount Fuji, profoundly influenced Western modernism and its descendants, by all means start at the beginning: How did the museum get its hands on such pristine copies? And what made Hiroshige (1797-1858) and his workshop so innovative?
An entire set of Hiroshiges colorful depictions of his native city was bound into a book, donated to the Brooklyn Museum and left in storage for 40 years before being unbound in the 1970s. Because it was probably intended especially for such a collection, this particular set was also a kind of luxury edition, made with extra care and details, such as the use of reflective metallic dust, that ordinary consumer-grade prints, for all their intricacy, didnt have.
The exhibition begins by comparing a contemporaneous but more old-fashioned print of Kameido Tenjin Shrine with Hiroshiges view of the same locale (No. 65), and you can see at once what an aesthetic leap was taking place in Japan in the 1850s. The old-fashioned one, by Kitao Shigemasa, is dry and comprehensive, like an illustrated map; Hiroshiges, with its unusual cropping, its emphasis on the shrines famous wisteria flowers and moon bridge to the exclusion of its actual buildings, is at once thrillingly visceral and shimmering with self-awareness, less a depiction of the shrines most notable features than a distillation of their visual and emotional impact.
In the main room, youll find 118 prints on the walls, either because 100 views wasnt meant literally or because brisk sales persuaded Hiroshige to issue extras. Theyre arranged in seasonal order, following an index published after the artists death, and their numbered labels are wonderfully concrete and informative. But you dont have to follow the order.
Every print offers a self-sufficient, stage-setlike world, and almost every one boasts some brilliant little aesthetic device that appears nowhere else. Notice the way Hiroshiges carvers loaded branches with snow by leaving unprinted space around them, in Bikuni Bridge in the Snow (No. 114), and how the large sign advertising mountain whale, or wild boar meat, upsets your sense of where the picture ends. (Is it writing, or a drawing of writing?) Clock the razor-thin lines of rain that shoot across Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake (No. 58) and the wild composition of Plum Estate, Kameido (No. 30): Van Gogh copied them both.
Its the prints flat economy, as well as their directorial focus on salient details, that live on in 20th-century Western comics and movies. Their tone is harder to keep hold of. Photographer Alex Falcón Bueno, whose recent views of Hiroshiges neighborhoods today form a pleasurable epilogue to the show, comes close, but pop artist Takashi Murakami, whose Japonisme Reconsidered series, also included here, reproduces Hiroshiges whole series on canvas, demonstrates just how much you can lose from medium to medium. In ink on paper, the careful narrowness of Hiroshiges vistas creates a sense of magical remove; in Murakamis acrylic and gold leaf, the same views become cloying and claustrophobic, even on a canvas 11 feet tall.
All that said, though, you can also just cut right to the heart of the matter by going directly to No. 48, Suido Bridge and Surugadai. It shows a large, vibrantly colored, carp-shaped windsock of the type that Japanese typically fly outdoors on Boys Day, May 5 (also known as Childrens Day). Crossing under its tail is the Kanda River, and behind it, after a broad green bank, the villages of Surugadai and Misaki extend back toward Mount Fuji. The narrow pole from which it hangs divides the picture asymmetrically in two; two smaller carp swim through the air on the rivers other side. A few tiny pedestrians carry umbrellas.
Depending where in the picture you look, youll find realism and perspective treated very differently. The plain beneath the village has depth, because it has to; Fuji is flat, because its an icon, and because flatness better catches its mystery. The people are simplified, the river is abstracted and the carp looks more like a real flying fish than any actual windsock could but also, still, like a windsock. Holding it all together gracefully is Hiroshiges serene comfort with the artifice of his medium.
Hiroshiges 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)
Through Aug. 4. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.