Designed for Pleasure is a visually beautiful exhibition catalogue and a great source of information concerning Japanese woodblock prints and books, Japanese paintings of the “floating world,” and the various cultures that commissioned, created, and enjoyed such works. The catalogue documents the 2008 Asia Society exhibition of the same name, which was a highly anticipated event as a result of the curators seeking out the very best works available from private and public collections in the United States. To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese Art Society of America, founded in 1973 as the Ukiyo-e Society of America, the exhibition organizers decided to include a variety of media depicting life in the pleasure quarters and in the kabuki theater districts. The catalogue editors and essayists are among the top scholars in their fields, and they have presented their insightful articles and picture captions with clarity and extensive documentation. The book should be useful to Japanese art collectors and to educators, who could easily use Designed for Pleasure as a textbook for college classes on Japanese arts or history.

Overall the volume is divided into two parts: the essays on topics related directly to the exhibition, and the catalogue which includes items in the exhibition, a listing of those works in Japanese, and a thirteen-page detailed index to the volume. The editing seems flawless, and the images are crisp, clear, and nearly perfect in color. The catalogue illustrations are in alphabetical order by the given names of artists, however, which means that the catalogue does not recreate a sense of what the exhibition was like nor does it present a chronological arrangement of works, but rather juxtaposes images from various time periods in odd ways that can be interesting but also confusing.

In Donald Jenkins’s introductory essay, “A Mirror on the Floating World,” the former director of the Portland Art Museum (PAM) reflects on “how ukiyo-e was seen in North America until quite recently” (15). Jenkins begins with Ernest Fenollosa’s efforts in 1896 to identify the “Masters of Ukioye” [sic] and the major themes and technological developments in Japanese woodblock printing. The ten periods defined by Fenellosa continued to influence collectors, dealers, curators, and scholars for nearly a century. Individuals and museums primarily acquired broadsheet prints, with only secondary interests directed toward ukiyo-e paintings and illustrated books produced by these same artists, often for the same clients. Both private and public collections in the United States also tended to focus solely on printed materials until the 1960 and 1970s, when paintings of the “floating world” came on the market and were featured in a few U.S. exhibitions.

Jenkins writes: “By the late 1980’s, the study of ukiyo-e had finally begun to acquire some academic respectability. Ukiyo-e could no longer be talked about in isolation from the broader context of Edo-period culture” (19). Jenkins’s own 1993 PAM exhibition and catalogue, The Floating World Revisited, was instrumental in displaying and discussing together a wide range of arts associated with the theater and brothel districts of Edo. Over the next decade, U.S. museums began to display prints with other media, and with references to political and social issues, such as government censorship of the visual and performing arts. Jenkins closes his Designed for Pleasure catalogue essay by briefly outlining new directions in scholarly research represented in the collection’s essays, and by making some general observations about issues of patronage, publication, and appreciation of objects from the “floating world.”

In “Hishikawa Moronobu: Tracking Down an Elusive Master,” David Waterhouse provides a survey of the latest research on the “father” of ukiyo-e, Moronobu (1631–1694). Moronobu had “an enduring influence on all later ukiyo-e artists, through his creation of a distinctive brand for Edo ukiyo-e: in style, in subject matter and in range of techniques and formats” (33). Waterhouse traces Moronobu’s complicated career, discusses the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters that were frequently depicted by the artist, and then investigates a stunning handscroll painting A Visit to the Yoshiwara in the John C. Weber Collection (New York City). This extraordinary work provides a panoramic overview of life in the brothels, showing clients shopping for courtesans, entertainers performing for customers, and even cooks preparing food. Waterhouse convincingly attributes the handscroll to Moronobu and then speculates as to whom might have commissioned such a deluxe product in the late 1680s—suggesting it was the wealthy samurai social climber “Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658–1714), protégé of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi” (49). Such an important client for Moronobu clearly indicates that ukiyo-e were not only images for common display and consumption in Edo but could also “be read as an exercise in nostalgia and fantasy” for political and military leaders who were not supposed to visit such government-controlled districts.

Sarah E. Thompson examines both the career of Okumura Masanobu (1686–1764) and Japanese innovations in woodblock printing during the early eighteenth century. “Masanobu’s long-lasting success in the competitive commercial world of ukiyo-e was due not only to his artistic ability but also to his skill at promoting himself and his products” (57). In her essay, “The Original Source (Accept No Substitutes!), Okumura Masanobu,” Thompson carefully outlines the artist’s activities at a time of dramatic changes in printing and marketing, sorting out which innovations Masanobu helped to create and which he quickly appropriated from other artists and publishers to further his own efforts as the self-proclaimed “founding father of Edo pictures.” Thompson concludes, “Whether as founder or developer, it was he more than any other single artist who was responsible for the changes in theme, format and technique that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century” (79).

In “Suzuki Harunobu, The Cult and Culture of Color,” Allen Hockley questions the accepted history of Japanese full-color printing as presented during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by collectors and scholars in Europe, the United States, and Japan. He documents the genre’s earliest examples and considers evidence that suggests “Harunobu’s most important legacy may not have been his contributions to full-color printing but rather, his efforts to turn the products of this new technology into marketable commodities” (84). Based on his own investigations into the careers of Harunobu (1725?–1770) and rival Isoda Koryūsai (1735–1790), and building on the research of Waterhouse, Jack Hillier, and Timothy Clark, Hockley challenges many assertions and assumptions regarding Harunobu’s role in print technology. Hockley discusses the issues of “creative reuse” and “plagiarism” as he reviews how ukiyo-e artists quickly copied each other in their efforts to sell prints. He concludes, “To devotees of the cult of color, Harunobu will always be the creative genius around whom coalesced the talent and energy needed to advance woodblock-print technology. Evidence contrary to this grand narrative will be ignored. . . . The cult of color is, after all, a cult of the artist—an enduring but highly problematical construct that often leaves other productive lines of inquiry unexplored” (97).

Timothy Clark entitles his essay, “Katsukawa Shunshō, Ukiyo-e Paintings for the Samurai Elite.” Having written extensively about Shunshō’s woodblock prints in other exhibition catalogues and collection surveys, Clark examines here several paintings in the John C. Weber Collection—three of beautiful women and two of kabuki actors. Clark elegantly describes these pieces and places them in a context that reveals how extraordinary they are: “Technically, and in terms of their appeal, his [Shunshō’s] paintings rank among the most significant ever produced in Japan, irrespective of period or school” (101). Shunshō’s works capture moods, reveal character, and engage viewers with exquisite details and subtle coloring. Clark, like other essayists in this volume, also explores samurai patronage for such high-quality paintings and deluxe edition prints.

In “Tsutaya Jūzaburō, Master Publisher,” Julie Nelson Davis considers both the Tsutaya publishing house and its major artists: Shunshō (1726–1792), Kitao Shigemasa (1739–1820), Kitao Masanobu (aka Santō Kyōden 1761–1816), Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806), and Tōshūsai Sharaku (active 1794–1795). Davis recounts the complex relationships among these men, and examines the creative organizing efforts of Tsutaya Jūzaburō (1750–1797) himself. By triangulating what little is known about the publisher, his stable of artists and writers, and his business rivals, Davis provides valuable insights into the publishing world of late eighteenth-century Edo. She discusses marketing strategies, profit margins, and crucial patronage issues with details that make the “floating world” seem alive with investment schemes and product placements. “Over the course of his career, Tsutaya published approximately 545 books—including some of the genre’s most important poetry albums, erotica and fiction—and several thousand designs for sheet prints. These numbers alone would make him one of the leading publishers of his era, but Tsutaya’s achievements are even more significant in the qualitative change he wrought in the milieu of commercial publishing” (138). Through Davis’s research, a crucial but little-known figure in the print world becomes more three dimensional.

In “The Literary Network: Private Commissions for Hokusai and his Circle,” John T. Carpenter considers some of the deluxe works created by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). Carpenter’s matching up of paintings and prints (especially some exquisite surimono) shown in the exhibition with particular clients and private poetry clubs reveals an artistic environment of great energy and innovation. Using his remarkable skills at translating deliberately allusive and often cryptic Japanese poems into highly readable English verse, Carpenter provides the kind of detail that has long been needed in ukiyo-e studies. In particular he explores the close relationship between Hokusai and the author/artist Kyōden, which had both literary and business dimensions. “Kyōden regularly added witty Chinese and Japanese poems to paintings by prominent ukiyo-e artists. This was a means of ‘customizing’ a painting for a special client” (154). Carpenter decodes these poems and explains the allusions to make the works both visual and textually meaningful. He closes his essay with a discussion of Hokusai’s daughters, who became artists themselves, thus providing valuable information about the few women who ever gained prominence as ukiyo-e painters.

A photograph of Marilyn Monroe by Cecil Beaton closes the essay section of the catalogue. In his provocative article, “Designed for Pleasure: Ukiyo-e as Material Culture,” David Pollack explores how “display, sex, fashion and marketing were inseparably intertwined quantities from the very start of early modern urban life in Japan. Ukiyo-e were commercial objects, among the most visible extant examples of a dynamic world of signs connecting money, goods and aesthetics” (169). Just like Hollywood, Edo’s entertainment industry used fashion to advertise the latest people and products available to consumers of all social levels. Pollack then follows the shift from fashion plates to landscape prints in the early nineteenth century, noting that depictions of “famous places” were more financially lucrative than the “myriad images of popular actors or courtesans dressed in fashions so outlandishly sumptuous that they could not be worn even by the wealthiest potential customers for fear of violating sumptuary laws” (179). Linking pictures of prostitutes in landscape settings with products for sale, such as cosmetics or kimono, brought financial success and visual complexity to Japanese prints in the nineteenth century. Thus closes the first part of Designed for Pleasure, a valuable chronological overview of those Japanese artists, publishers, and patrons who helped create a world of extraordinary prints and paintings.