context: painting > prints > subjects

Mitate-e

This is an odd category wherein ordinary contemporary subjects and settings are referencing classical and mythological themes and stories - a petty domestic spat might be an explicit analogue to a great military story, and so on. These are hard to understand, especially when not familiar with the basic cultural building blocks that they refer to; but also no one seems very clear on how they were pitched and sold and read.

Some critics cast them as parody, as something like a middle finger from the sleazy printmakers with their sordid subjects, aimed at the classicists and aristocrats who sneer down at them. Others make them into a claim of legitimacy, of parity with the great painters of the past. The former seems to be foisting a punk attitude onto these artists with no great evidence, the latter seems too meta in a Modernist way - and we can't easily believe both. Both seem to me to be wishful thinking. We should perhaps recall Kurosawa reshaping Shakespeare, and wonder if there may be a similar or related impulse there, a desire to rethink something and reuse it in new ways, perhaps a recognition of the power of this old cultural currency - but that may well be me foisting my own Postmodernist interpretations onto it, as may my other sense of it being in large part playful, showing a ludic impulse. The fact is, I don't know - I just see differing accounts from different art historians, and think they are all to be doubted. Christine Guth suggests that references to past artistic glories was the starting motivation, reaching towards a legitimacy by association, but that as Edo became more self-confident, they became more satirical (she doesn't say what the satire is, what the criticism might be). This is as plausible an account as any, but I suspect it's much more complex, multivalenced and harder to unpack than that.

It's hard to offer examples of this - they're hard to distinguish from other pictures of young people in the pleasure quarters, at home, on a bridge. A title might be a clue, but often it's through symbolism that those not immersed in Japanese culture are highly unlikely to get. Finally, this seems to be a layer of meaning almost totally opaque to outsiders.

backwards: birds & flowers