The ukiyo-e artist Isoda Koryusai produced thousands of designs between 1769 and 1781, a crucial period in the evolution of the print tradition, and was honored with the imperial title of hokko, yet he has been long neglected by scholars. Allen Hockley has identified more than 2,500 designs of wide-ranging formats and themes, demonstrating that Koryusai broadened the treatment of traditional print subjects and appealed to a wider and more varied audience. Koryusai's sheer output suggests he may very well be the most productive artist of the eighteenth century. Refuting outmoded paradigms of connoisseurship and challenging the assumptions of conventional print scholarship, Allen Hockley elevates this important figure from the status of a minor Edo-period artist. He argues that Koryusai excelled by the most significant measure - he was a highly successful creator of popular commodities. Employing an 'active audience' model, Hockley reshapes the study of ukiyo-e as a scholarly discipline by assessing Koryusai's significance from the perspective of consumer culture. While scholars will be intrigued by Hockley's groundbreaking arguments, general readers will be fascinated by Koryusai's richly varied career. Five appendixes catalog all of the artist's known print designs, forming a record of Koryusai's works that will serve as a lasting reference text for collectors, dealers, and curators. Allen Hockley is professor of art history at Dartmouth College.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Koryusai's career spans one of ukiyo-e's truly formative periods, and the book's combination of fresh method, common sense, solid research, and thoughtful analysis produces a long-overdue alternative to the inherited wisdom about that period."--Quitman E. Phillips, University of Wisconsin
About the Author
Allen Hockley is associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New perspectives on an important artist,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Prints of Isoda Koryusai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Hardcover)
I found the book to be very useful in understanding ukiyoe prints from novel perspectives--especially consumer patterns and, more importantly, in terms of how artists were influenced by one another. Koryusai has long been overlooked and this book helps set the record straight. I've read most of the books in English on woodblock prints and this one gives us a refreshingly new approach. I like the way the author deals with culture, the circulation of images, women (I'm a woman and I detect no misogyny--as another reviewer suggests...), sex, and popular culture. It has loads of useful information for all levels of reader. I might never use the appendices, but they should be welcomed by scholars in the area of Edo art and culture. I highly recommend this book ! I only wish that there were more color illustrations, but for that I'll just have to go to the many OTHER Japanese print books and museum catalogues that illustrate Koryusai in color--but say nothing new or very useful about him!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth the money,
This review is from: The Prints of Isoda Koryusai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Hardcover)
I was really looking forward to reading this book when I heard it was coming out - Koryusai's never received the kind of attention he really deserves. What I wasn't expecting was that the first part of the book would be focused entirely on a detailed description of what is in the books written by everyone else who's ever written about Koryusai before Hockley (I can read those books if I want to know what's in them), and how every single one of them was wrong. The book description says that "Five appendixes catalog all of the artist's known print designs". They "list" the prints, but that's all. There are titles like "Courtesan parading with her kamuro" - no date, no publisher's mark, no description - so, how would I know the print if I saw it? Using the lists requires an awful lot of work. The index is awful - spanning only two pages, there's next to nothing in it. This book represents a missed opportunity, definitely falls way short of "groundbreaking", and at 60 dollars this petite volume with its handful of tiny illustrations is overpriced.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of sloppy, low production values,
By timmons (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Prints of Isoda Koryusai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Hardcover)
Not worth $60. Most of the black & white illustrations look smudgy, and the appendix is pretty incoherent. You really have to work hard for some of the information.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
