Ukiyo-e (Japanese Woodblock)

For two and a half centuries, from the late seventeenth century until the early twentieth, the Japanese print tradition known as ukiyo-e — "pictures of the floating world" — produced one of the most visually distinctive and influential graphic languages in world history. The "floating world" of the name referred to the urban pleasure-districts of Edo (now Tokyo) — the kabuki theaters, the teahouses, the courtesans, the festivals — and the prints were originally mass-produced commercial products, sold cheaply, for ordinary townspeople. They were not, at the time, considered fine art. They were the popular media of their day, closer in function to magazines or posters than to oil paintings.

The technical method was distinctive. A designer (the famous names — Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Sharaku — were the designers, though they barely touched the final object) would produce an outline drawing. A carver would cut a block of cherrywood for each color, plus one for the black outline. A printer would ink the blocks and press paper onto them, color by color, sometimes producing prints in editions of thousands. The economics were industrial; the result, paradoxically, has the appearance of a personal artwork.

What made ukiyo-e visually revolutionary — and what would shake Western art in the late nineteenth century — was a set of grammatical choices completely different from the Western academic tradition. Western painting since the Renaissance had been built on illusionistic depth, modeled form, atmospheric perspective, and the chiaroscuro of light and shadow. Ukiyo-e refused almost all of this. The image was flat. There was no shadow. Forms were defined by clean outlines and filled with flat planes of color. Composition was decisively asymmetric — figures crowded one edge of the frame, important elements were cropped at the picture's edge, the foreground was sometimes much larger than the background for purely compositional rather than perspectival reasons. Subjects were often shown from radical angles: a wave from beneath, a bridge from above, an actor's face cropped to fill the frame. Each of these choices was a deliberate, sophisticated graphic decision — but they violated nearly every rule of the European tradition.

In the 1850s and 1860s, after Japan was forcibly opened to Western trade, ukiyo-e prints — used as cheap packing paper for porcelain exports — started appearing in Paris. The French painters of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist generation saw them and were stunned. Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Cassatt, van Gogh (who copied Hiroshige's prints in oil paint as a study exercise), Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard — every one of them studied ukiyo-e closely, and every one of them changed their work in response. The compositional cropping, the flat planes of color, the asymmetric layouts, the willingness to let the picture frame slice through a figure — these are not Western inventions. They are ukiyo-e lessons absorbed into Western painting in the space of about fifteen years.

From the Impressionists, those lessons passed into the entire trajectory of modern Western design. Art Nouveau drew explicitly from Japanese print compositions. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, which essentially invented modern graphic design, are unimaginable without Hokusai. The flat-color, hard-edged poster design that came to define twentieth-century advertising — and, through it, modern logo design and contemporary flat UI — descends in a continuous line from ukiyo-e through Lautrec through Cassandre through Swiss design through Apple's marketing pages. Almost every flat illustration on the modern web, almost every layout that crops decisively and asymmetrically, almost every poster that confidently flattens form — all of this is, at root, ukiyo-e. The most influential graphic-language transfer in modern history happened when Parisian painters started buying packing paper.