The British Museum has received a major gift of Japanese art to the American Friends of the British Museum from Arthur R Miller, the American legal scholar and former TV commentator on law. Professor Miller has assembled a world class collection of colour woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), a major master of the ‘floating world’, or Ukiyo-e school of Japanese art, and contemporary of Hokusai and Hiroshige. The first part of his gift to the American Friends is a collection of 64 beautifully preserved Kuniyoshi prints. The American Friends will place the collection on loan to the British Museum, which has very significant holdings of Japanese art, including 380 other works by Kuniyoshi, and is a major centre for the study, preservation and display of Japanese prints.
Miller assembled a comprehensive collection of more than 1,800 Kuniyoshi prints over many years, and he placed them on deposit at the British Museum in early 2008. He has promised to gift to American Friends the remaining portions of his collection in the future. When completed, the gifts will be one of the largest donations of Japanese prints ever made.
The British Museum will progressively make the collection accessible on the Museum’s website, thanks to complete digital photography provided by the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. In addition, more than one hundred examples from Professor Miller’s extraordinary collection will feature in an exhibition dedicated to the work of Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in the spring of 2009. It is hoped the exhibition will travel to Japan Society in New York in 2010
Commenting on his latest gift, Miller said: ‘Having loved the wonderful artistry of Kuniyoshi throughout the many years I collected his work, I am delighted that the American Friends of the British Museum will accept stewardship of my gift and that the British Museum will make them available for others to study and enjoy.’
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum responded, ‘We are delighted by this extraordinarily generous and significant gift from Professor Arthur R. Miller to the American Friends of the British Museum. It is our expectation that American Friends will in due course grant the entire collection to the Museum.'
Kuniyoshi considerably expanded the existing repertoire of the Ukiyo-e school, particularly with thousands of designs that brought vividly to life famous military battles in Japan and China. He wittily incorporated into this history many fantastic elements from literature, folklore and myth. A career-changing series of ‘108 Heroes of The Water Margin’ appeared in the late 1820s, featuring warrior heroes from a favourite Chinese tale. Censorship regulations frequently required him to displace events of recent centuries to a more distant fictional past. Kuniyoshi developed an extraordinarily powerful and imaginative style in his prints, often spreading a scene dynamically across all three sheets of the traditional triptych format and linking the composition with one bold unifying element - a major artistic innovation. A fine example is Seabed at Daimotsu Bay (c1850), which shows the samurai general Tomomori and other warriors of the Taira clan who drowned at the sea battle of Dannoura (AD 1185) plotting revenge against their enemy Yoshitsune, the composition unified by a giant anchor encrusted with shells. Tomomori summons for the attack on Yoshitsune’s ship an army of monster crabs, which have the faces of more drowned warriors on their backs.
Kuniyoshi was also very active in the other major subjects and genres of floating world art: prints of beautiful women, Kabuki actors, landscapes, comic themes, erotica and commissioned paintings. In each of these he was experimental, imaginative and distinctly different from his contemporaries. With his comic prints, for example, Kuniyoshi developed a new genre of ‘crazy pictures’ that often featured animals impersonating humans. It is recorded that Kuniyoshi had a private collection of European prints and illustrations, which seem to have informed quite a few of his experiments in exotic ‘foreign’ subjects and also landscapes of his native city of Edo (modern Tokyo). These cityscapes often have unexpected viewpoints and displacement of the central motifs that can give them an eccentric, even uncanny flavour.
