Ukiyo-e Masters of the Utagawa School: Kuniyoshi and Kunisada. Review of the Second Edition of M. V. Uspensky’s Monograph «Kuniyoshi and His Time»

Abstract

In early 2024, a Saint Petersburg publishing house and independent publishing partner of the State Hermitage Museum “Arka” published a reedition of the catalogue of the exhibition “Kuniyoshi and His Time. Japanese Prints of the 19^th Century. The Utagawa School,” which took place in 1997– 1998. The author of this catalogue is M. V. Uspensky (1953–1997), one of the greatest Russian researchers of Japanese fine art and curator of the museum’s Japanese collection.
Following the original, the central figures of the second edition’s narrative are contemporaries and graduates of the Utagawa school, the artists Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861) and Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865). Just as in the original, the texts describing their different periods of work are followed by catalogue descriptions. Bat, unlike the first edition, these cataloge descriptions have a larger number of exclusively colored illustrations, some of which are presented for the first time. Moreover, missing sheets of polyptychs from the collections of other museums are also included, which undoubtedly gives a more holistic perception of the works. In total, the catalogue descriptions contain 299 illustrations, 143 of which are by Kuniyoshi and his students, and 156 by Kunisada. As for the texts, they are published without much change, except for the addition of the article “Memorial Portraits and Self-Portraits by Kuniyoshi and His Disciples” and the inclusion of illustrations and images with fragments of kanji texts, seals, signatures, etc. in the narrative.
e narrative. In general, throughout the book, Kuniyoshi and his mushae, to whom twothirds of the book is devoted, are contrasted with Kunisada and his yakushae and bijinga. This allows the author to paint a rather comprehensive picture of the state of ukiyo-e in the first half of the 19^th century.