Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery hosts debut for woodblock prints

WASHINGTON, DC - The Japanese city of Edo ceased to exist on September 3rd, 1868. Then, it was renamed Tokyo (“Eastern Capital”) by Japan’s new rulers.

Painting “Kiyochika: Master of the Night” is on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery since March 29 and lasts till July 12. It is one of the woodblock prints by Kobayashi Kiyochika. The exhibition is open during the National Cherry Blossom Festival (March 20 – April 22), especially for celebrating of Japanese culture in Washington, D.C.

Kiyochika (1847–1915) returned to Tokyo in 1874 to discover his hometown transformed by railroads, steamships, gaslights and brick buildings —all beyond imagination just a few years earlier. He set out to record these new scenes, where old and new stood together in awkward alliance, in an auspicious and ambitious series of 100 woodblock prints.

“His view is a stark one, of men and women on the verge of a world with all the old props kicked away. There are no heavens or hells; no intercessory gods or troublesome demons. Some viewers say they can feel the silence in his prints”.

His innovative use of color explored the possibilities of light and subjects drift through moody shades of gray and blue interspersed with fireworks, moonlight, gaslight and fireflies.

The works on view are part of the Sackler Gallery’s Robert O. Muller Collection, which features among its 4,000 Japanese woodblock prints the most comprehensive survey of Kiyochika’s body of work, including the largest collection of his cityscapes.

The themes of “Master of the Night” echo in the related exhibition “An American in London: Whistler and the Thames” (May 3–Aug. 17), featuring James McNeill Whistler’s (1859–1903) images of London’s iconic waterways.