Japanese Woodblock Prints. 40th Ed

From Edouard Manet's portrait of naturalist writer mile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh's meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that first enthralled France and, later, all of Europebut often remains misunderstood as an exotic artifact that helped inspire Western creativity.

The fact is that the Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon of which there exists no Western equivalent. Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern artincluding, as Karl Marx put it, that all that is solid melts into airwere invented in Japan in the 1700s and expressed like never before in the designs of such masters as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige in the early 19th century.