TELL ME ABOUT IT
100 Aspects Of The Moon, The Midnight Moon At Mt. Yoshino: Iga No Tsubone
For Tell Me About It, an MCAM staff member asks an art historian about one item in the Collection they want to know more about. In this edition, program director Jayna Swartzman-Brosky, asked Professor Emerita of Asian Art History, Carver Professor in East Asian Studies, Mary-Ann Milford about Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s, 100 Aspects Of The Moon, The Midnight Moon At Mt. Yoshino: Iga No Tsubone.
Tell me about the artist.
Yoshitoshi (Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1839–1892), was one of the last great Japanese woodblock print designers who worked in the Ukiyo-e (Floating World) style that prevailed in the city of Edo (Tokyo) during the Shogunate Tokugawa Period (1600–1852). He lived through the traumatic transitional period when Japan, after over 200 years of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world was pressured to open her shores by Matthew Perry, the American sea captain who sailed with his Black Ships from San Francisco to Yokohama in 1853. During the following half-century with the help of engineers and experts from around the world, Japan re-invented herself as a modern nation. Roads and railways were built, gas and electricity were introduced. New western style architecture replaced much of the traditional forms. Western-style clothing was adopted, as was western music, art, and most significant, photography. All of this came at a significant psychological and emotional price for the people of Japan, and it is this sense of confusion over the loss of their traditional past coupled with excitement and anticipation for the modernizing world that Yoshitoshi captures in his prints.
At the age of 11, Yoshitoshi was sent to study with the well-known woodblock-print designer, Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi introduced Yoshitoshi to western styles of art, including drawing and painting from live models, which was a revolutionary technique in Asia in the 19th century. In the turbulent and lawless 1860s, after the deaths of both his father and Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi started to produce a series of prints that were published in the local newspapers. These early prints were journalistic in nature and portrayed bloody battle scenes awash with corpses, disturbing murders, ghostly images, and legendary warriors. Throughout his life Yoshitoshi suffered from severe depression. He had many affairs with geisha, a daughter who only lived for two years, and was married, yet continued to frequent the entertainment district of Yoshiwara. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 9, 1892, at the age of fifty-three.
Tell me about the series 100 Aspects of the Moon.
Yoshitoshi produced most of his prints in series, which was a common practice among ukiyo-e artists. As he grew older his depressions deepened, as he perceived the cultural shifts that were taking place. He sensed the loss of ancient Japanese values in the face of the intersections he was witnessing with the arrival of western culture. What motivated this particular series is unknown. There is no connecting narrative to the prints, each of which stands alone and contains within it a depiction of the moon. The subject matters are mostly drawn from ancient Japanese and Chinese mythology, folklore, and historical events. The symbolism of the moon plays a significant role in most of the world’s cultures. Its coolness is the yin, or counterpart, to the yang, the burning heat and brightness of the sun. The moon for Yoshitoshi seems to draw on a deep sense of emotion and nostalgia for an irretrievable past. In each of the prints of this series the moon seems to appear incidentally, in none of them is the focus on the lunar presence, yet it heightens a certain sense of poignancy in each composition. Throughout Japan’s history the moon’s presence has summoned awareness of the fleetingness of nature, whether it is the moon shining on freshly fallen snow, or the petals of cherry blossoms welcoming Spring, or the rippling on the surface of running water. Many literate Japanese would compose a death haiku, poem, prior to their death. Yoshitoshi, reflected on the moon in his own death haiku,
Tell me about the image.
In 1333 the Emperor Go-Daigo attempted to rule Japan in place of the Kamakura Shogun. Just three years later he was threatened by the rising Ashikaga clan. Sadaki no Kiyotaka, a court advisor to the emperor, recognized the weakness of the imperial position and advised the emperor not to fight the Ashikagas.
Go-Daigo refused to recognize his situation, so Kiyotaka hoping to gain political favor encouraged the emperor to fight. The imperial troops were badly beaten, and the emperor fled to Yoshino and set up a puppet government to the south of Kiyoto. Kiyotaka was forced to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, because of his poor advice, and from that time on, each night his ghost frequented the puppet emperor Go-Daigo’s palace, until one night Iga no Tsubone, a court woman, approached the ghost with a lamp full of fireflies and was able to appease it until it disappeared for good. Due to her courage and loyalty to the emperor, Iga no Tsubone has been lauded as an ideal example of Japanese patriotism.
In this print Iga no Tsubone stands with her back to the viewer. We see her long black hair cascading down over her burnt orange skirt, as she confronts the ghostly, winged figure of Kiyotaka who descends from the upper right corner. His eyes are red and his lips are blue, the color associated with death. The lower part of his body fades away behind floating maple leaves, a signifier of Fall, and his evaporation. The moon in the upper left corner appears as if eclipsed, which further emphasizes the strength of Iga no Tsubone.
Tell me more…
Ukiyo-e prints of the Floating World, were made specifically for the rising middle classes of the Tokugawa Period that consisted of merchants, bankers, and tradesmen who frequented the Yoshiwara, or entertainment district of Edo. Due to the political isolation restrictions, the people of Edo had plenty of money to spend, and they did so by supporting the Kabuki theatre, building elaborate homes, and collecting ukiyo-e prints, most of the time inventing ingenious was of bypassing the Shogunate’s sumptuary laws. The subjects of many prints focused on the life of the Yoshiwara and its denizens, and in the early 19th century they expanded their topics from beautiful women to series of landscape prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Yoshitoshi was drawn to mythological and historical topics.
Prints by their very nature are collaborative undertakings that require many steps and the work of several craftsmen. The publishers were important because they sensed what topics were popular and would sell well. They would commission artists to design prints, which were then transferred to cherry woodblocks for carving. Each color used required a separate block; sometimes as many as seventy to eighty blocks for one print would be made. The blocks were impressed onto handmade mulberry paper; this is a very strong paper as it had to take the impressions of multiple blocks. The final finishing block provided a refreshed black outline that had invariably been covered by the numerous color blocks.
The final touches required the placement of seals and signatures that provided the names of the artist, the publisher, the date, the name of the print, and often the censor’s seal. In the upper right corner of this print Kiyotaka grasps in his clawed left hand a square cartouche that gives the name of the series, Yoshinoyama yowa no tsuki: Iga no Tsubone (Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon: Iga no Tsubone). To the right on a pink background is the series title: Tsuki hyakushi (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon). Lower down, also on the right side appears Yoshitoshi’s signature and his red seal. At the very bottom is a small oblong seal with the engraver’s name, Enkatsu. In the margin on the lower left side, is the printing and publishing date (1.1886), followed by the publisher’s and artist’s addresses and seals.
Ukiyo-e prints were very popular, and initial printings often sold out as soon as they appeared in print sellers’ stalls. Many people collected the prints and bound them in albums; today the albums that have survived contain superb prints that retain their original colors. Because the surviving prints were gathered by different collectors, there is no particular order to them. Mills College Art Museum has a particularly fine copy of this series in its collection, its condition being maintained as the prints with their fugitive colors are rarely exposed to damaging ultra-violet rays.
About the Expert
Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Professor Emerita of Asian Art History, Carver Professor in East Asian Studies, has been at Mills since 1982. She has taught courses that cover the ancient, classical and contemporary histories of the art of India, China, Japan and the Himalayas. She has also curated exhibitions on the arts of India, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. In support of her work she has received many grants and fellowships from the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) and AIIS (American Institute for Indian Studies). When she received tenure at Mills she turned her research attention from Sanskrit and South Asian Archaeology to study contemporary art in Asia, focusing on women artists that resulted in her curating the first exhibition of contemporary Indian Art to be held in the United States. This was a direct result of her Mills students who wanted to know what was happening in the Asian artworlds today.
During her career at Mills Mary-Ann, at one time or another, has been on all the college committees, including the Appointment, Promotion and Tenure Committee and the Faculty Executive Committee. She has also been on the Study Abroad Committee since her arrival at Mills, a committee that she has chaired many times due to her belief in the importance for students to experience the world outside of Mills, California and the United States. She has also been Head of the Art and Art History Department, Dean of Fine Arts, Director of the Mills Art Museum, and most significantly, Provost and Dean of the Faculty. She found the latter role to be one of the most rewarding of her career, as it gave her an opportunity to work with both the Academic and the Administrative sides of Mills, and most special of all was that she got to know all the members of the faculty and the staff.
Mary-Ann has published widely in the field of South Asian art, and in recent years she has turned her attention to Asian American artists. She has curated, juried and written extensively on contemporary art and is planning to continue her work with Zarina Hashmi, an international Indian artist living in New York, and AAWAA the Asian American Women Artists Association based in San Francisco. She is also continuing her work with the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, where she oversees their docent training program and lecture series, and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Society for Asian Art. And, of course, being the parent of an alumna, Dimity Lutzker ’93, she will never be far from Mills.
