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| Price: |
$85.00 |
| Member Price: |
$76.50 |
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| Author: |
Bell,D |
| Publisher: |
Global Oriental Ltd., 11/04 |
| Format: |
HC,
320pp |
| Region: |
East Asia |
| Country: |
Japan
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Distributed for Global Oriental, Ltd.
A great many volumes already exist on the subject of ukiyo-e—mostly single-focus works intended to appeal to connoisseurs or art historians. Ukiyo-e Explained, however, is the first integrated study with wider scholarly appeal to show how ukiyo-e is art but also social history, culture and craft.
The term ukiyo-e (lit. ‘floating world pictures’) refers to a distinctive phenomenon in Japanese art during the Edo period and can be defined temporally, geographically and socially. Most importantly, it developed its own distinctive stylistic character. Hitherto, most studies of ukiyo-e have been founded on a descriptive approach where authors have sought to identify its principal characteristics and describe the output of the different schools and artists.
Recent research, however, has shifted into a more explanatory mode, locating explanations of ukiyo-e’s distinctive pictorial character in descriptions of the sociocultural context to which it pertained.
This study illuminates new pathways to a greater appreciation of ukiyo-e by examining the environments and conditions under which ukiyo-e artists worked. Consequently, the author explores the conceptual foundations which informed the artists and the ways artists learned the knowledge and skills of their craft; also, and most importantly, he examines the sorts of function ukiyo-e pictures were required to perform and the conventions, pictorial devices, spatial constraints and material conditions under which they worked.(U.of Hawaii Pr.)
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