. fûzoku 風俗 Fuzoku and sex business .
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Shunga Daruma 春画だるま erotic paintings
This side looks quite harmless as a wall hanger.
Here we are in a different world
Photos from my friend Ishino
Some Daruma Netsuke come in form of Shunga, erotic scenes 春画
Netsuke : O-Kame
Netsuke : Nr. 47
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Very small netsuke
but inside
Photos from my friend Ishino
. nanshoku、danshoku 男色 homosexuality in Edo .
. fûzoku 風俗 Fuzoku and sex business .
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Sexually explicit Japanese art challenges Western ideas
It is one of the most salacious images in the history of art: deep underwater, a gigantic pink octopus drags a naked young woman into a cleft between two rocks. As his coiling tentacles slither over her blemish-free body, caressing a nipple and encircling her nubile legs, this unlikely molluscoid lover pleasures his prostrate captive, who throws back her head in ecstasy while a second, smaller octopus plants a tender kiss upon her mouth.
To modern eyes, it may look like a piece of titillating filth. But this woodblock print, which is known in the West as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and was created in 1814 by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), who also famously depicted a tumultuous wave apparently about to swallow up Mount Fuji, is in fact a sophisticated work of art belonging to a genre known as ‘shunga’, or erotic ‘spring pictures’, which thrived in Japan between about 1600 and 1900.
A spellbinding, exhilarating and often eye-popping exhibition, Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, collating more than 150 works of shunga, opens this week at the British Museum in London. A copy of Hokusai’s notorious print once owned by the French connoisseur Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote a monograph about the artist, is included in the show, as well as a steamy translation of the picture’s abundant text, which contains several onomatopoeic sighs and exclamations signifying the woman’s fulfilment.
“Today shunga gets treated like obscene pornography,” explains Timothy Clark, who has curated the British Museum’s exhibition. “People who haven’t seen shunga before will be surprised by how explicit it can be. But this is sexually explicit art, not pornography, produced to exactly the same technical perfection as art in other formats by the same people. Hokusai was working during the Edo period, which had a playful spirit, and the octopus story comes from an ancient tale about a diver woman who stole a jewel from the Dragon King’s palace at the bottom of the sea. Hokusai was expecting a comic response. A lot of the scenarios in shunga are preposterous – there’s fantasy at work.”
- - -Sinful pleasures?
When considering shunga, it is important to shed censorious attitudes towards sexuality that have been a fundamental part of western Christian culture for so long. Although printed shunga was officially illegal in Japan after 1722, it was widely tolerated – indeed, during the three centuries of its popularity many thousands of images were produced in a variety of formats: multi-volume books, bound albums sometimes exchanged as wedding gifts, painted handscrolls, and sets of small-format prints possibly sold in wrappers.
Shunga could be sensuous and comic, but it was rarely violent or exploitative. Most shunga depicts vigorous heterosexual couples in mutual bliss – and these prints were likely cherished by men and women, both young and old, from different strata of society, including samurai lords as well as prosperous merchants and commoners. “The division between art and obscene pornography is a Western conception,” says Clark. “There was no sense in Japan that sex or sexual pleasure was sinful.”
- - - Art of intimacy
The golden age of shunga coincided with technical advances in printing around 1765 and lasted into the early 19th Century. In these decades many of the masters of the so-called ‘ukiyo-e’ colour woodblock print turned their attention to shunga, including Kitagawa Utamaro, whose ravishing masterpiece Poem of the Pillow (1788), a folding album containing 12 colour-printed illustrations, was one of 31 shunga works by the artist. “Utamaro is probably the most important shunga artist,” explains Clark. “Shunga forms a high percentage of his overall oeuvre. But he had a naturally very sensuous line radiating passion no matter what he drew – it didn’t have to be people having sex.”
The exhibition at the British Museum also contains shunga by Torii Kiyonaga, whose Handscroll for the Sleeve (c. 1785) favoured a radically-cropped, horizontally elongated format to enhance the illusion of intimacy, and Suzuki Harunobu, whose 24-sheet narrative series Elegant Erotic Mane’emon (1770) is a comedy of manners in which the hero, having drunk a divine potion that shrinks his body down to the size of a bean, travels around different provinces observing various types of lovemaking. After seeing the pumpkin-sized testicles of a randy old farmer, the bean man Mane’emon informs us that things are different in the country.
In much shunga, the protagonists have meticulously rendered and enlarged genitals – but the effect is rarely grotesque. Instead, shunga artists create swirling compositions to reflect the frenzied ardour of lovemaking, and play with pleasing contrasts between bare flesh and gorgeous, beautifully patterned textiles.
Perhaps nobody has described the effect of shunga more elegantly than the 19th Century aesthete Goncourt, who wrote about “the furious, almost angry copulations; the somersaults of rutting pairs, knocking over the folding screen of a bedroom; the mingling of bodies which dissolve into one another; the sensual excitability of the arms, both inviting and resisting coitus; the epilepsy of the feet, toes twisted, waving in the air; the devouring mouth-to-mouth kisses, the swooning woman, head thrown back and touching the floor, with the petite mort on her face, eyes closed under painted lids; finally, the force, the power of the outline which makes the drawing of a phallus equal to that of the hand in the Musée du Louvre attributed to Michelangelo”. If that doesn’t incite passion to discover shunga, then nothing will.
- source : bbc.com/culture/story - Alastair Sooke 2014 -
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. Dreams about the Octopus 蛸と伝説 .
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electing 100 prostitutes from Edo
百人女郎品定 : 絵草紙 Hyakunin Joro Shinasadame: Ezoshi
上,下之巻 / 西川祐信 Mishawka Sukenobu (1671-1751)
- reference : wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki -
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makurae, makura-e 枕絵 "pillow paintings"
Edo Shunga Seiai Makurae
by Junji Yoshizaki (Author) - at amazon com
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[ . BACK to DARUMA MUSEUM TOP . ]
[ . BACK to WORLDKIGO . TOP . ]
- #shunga #edoshunga #makurae -
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EDO
fuuzoku, fûzoku 風俗 Fuzoku, entertainment and sex business
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Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art
Timothy Clark (Author, Editor), C.Andrew Gerstle (Editor), Aki Ihigami (Editor), Akiko Yano (Editor)
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see amazon com
In early modern Japan, 1600 1900, thousands of sexually explicit paintings, prints, and illustrated books with texts were produced, known as spring pictures (shunga). This catalogue of a major exhibition at the British Museum marks the culmination of a substantial international research project and aims to answer some key questions about what shunga was and why it was produced. In particular the social and cultural contexts for sex art in Japan are explored. Drawing on the latest scholarship from the leading experts in the field and featuring over 400 images of works from major public and private collections, this landmark book looks at painted and printed erotic images produced in Japan during the Edo period (1600 1868) and early Meiji era (1868 1912).
貸本の底に春画や夏の午後
kashihon no soko ni shunga ya natsu no gogo
below the rental books
there are the Shunga -
afternoon in summer
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book lenders in Edo
Shunga exhibition
Intricate, Beautiful, Raunchy: Japan Embraces Its Ancient Erotic Print Tradition, an exhibition:
The first half of Shunga continues at Eisei Bunko Museum (1 Chome-1-1 Mejirodai, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan) through November 1.
The second half runs from November 3 through December 23.
The exhibition is preceded in scope by only one other show, which opened at the British Museum in 2013 and drew close to 90,000 visitors in three months. Nearly half of the works on display at Eisei Bunko come from the British Museum, with the rest borrowed from various Japanese museums and private collections. Open since mid-September, Shunga, too, is attracting so many people that organizers have been reporting heavy visitor congestion and 20-30-minute waiting lines. Despite the works’ popularity, their highly explicit nature is the chief reason behind their limited display in museums: as Japan Today notes, finding sponsors for large shunga exhibitions is difficult, and curators often express worry about public complaints. Ten establishments turned down requests to host Shunga before Eisei-Bunko offered its space, and the exhibit is restricted to museum-goers 18 years old and up (the British Museum advised parental guidance for those under 16).
These works have historically been taboo, with the Japanese government issuing an edict in 1722 that banned their production during much of the Edo period. Of course, they continued to emerge — often unsigned — and were widely circulated in Japan, although to Western eyes they were often regarded as pornographic.
As British Museum curator Tim Clark explained, it is likely that “everybody in Japanese society, from the ruling class down to the ordinary townsperson down in the street, used and enjoyed shunga. This is a situation that would have been inconceivable in Europe at the same time. In the West we’ve come up with this rigid division between what we define as art on the one hand and what we declare to be obscene or pornographic on the other.”
http://hyperallergic.com/240689/intricate-beautiful-raunchy-japan-embraces-its-ancient-erotic-print-tradition/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The+Most+Endangered+Heritage+Sites+of+2016+from+Cuban+Art+Schools+to+the+Oldest+Underwater+City&utm_content=The+Most+Endangered+Heritage+Sites+of+2016+from+Cuban+Art+Schools+to+the+Oldest+Underwater+City+CID_8194f70925f8b96914f4d6bffbbabb05&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Intricate%20Beautiful%20Raunchy%20Japan%20Embraces%20Its%20Ancient%20Erotic%20Print%20Tradition
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continued
While the works are indeed graphic, they reflect the same artistic and technical finesse of less risqué ukiyo-e. Couples caught in the act of lovemaking are rendered with bold outlines and colors, and the garments and blankets they teasingly lift are often decorated with highly intricate, beautiful patterns. Attention is not lost, either, on detailing the places where such lust-filled scenes occurred. One work by Hishikawa Moronobu that shows a samurai (identifiable by his sword) embraced by his wide-legged lover also features a wall painting of a grinning tiger and four bamboo trees; another by Suzuki Harunobu includes in its background a black-spotted cat on a porch eying a butterfly hovering above a bonsai tree. Next to the two interlocked figures is an open and inked notebook, suggesting that the vignette is part of a greater narrative.
Many shunga were actually completed as stories conveyed in a series of scenes that progressively increased in intensity. Regarded as one of the genre’s masterpieces, Kitagawa Utamaro’s 1788 “Poem of the Pillow” contains 12 erotic illustrations in one album. One extremely detailed scene shows lovers in the upstairs room of a tea house, wrapped in flimsy patterned fabrics as they embrace one another. You can catch a glimpse of the man’s right eye, fixed on the features of the woman, who is turned resolutely away from us. It’s an affectionate moment that makes us highly aware of our voyeurism, but Utamaro has included one hint that the couple is aware of the viewer: the man holds out a fan with a poem written on its folds. Its beak caught firmly in the clamshell, the snipe cannot fly away on an autumn evening, it reads.
While shunga appeared mostly as ukiyo-e, some images were also painted on hand scrolls, such as Torii Kiyonaga’s 1785 “Handscroll for the Sleeve.” The long, narrow scroll enabled its owner to roll up the 11 images and tuck them into his sleeve to carry around, according to Clark. Like Utamaro’s illustration, Kiyonaga’s also exemplifies how shunga capture moments of intimacy as much as they depict physical acts. In one scene, a couple gazes with intensity into each other’s eyes, the privacy of the moment emphasized by the closely cropped image. The man places his fingers to his mouth, suggestive of the pleasure his lover will soon receive, which “gives a real idea of the mutuality of shunga — how it’s pleasure for women as well as pleasure for men,” as Clark says.
wagoojin 和合神 Wago-Jin - Deity of conjugal harmony
and
葛飾北斎 萬福和合神 Manpuku Wago-Jin
石上阿希 Ishigami Aki
An illustrated book about all kinds of lovers . . .
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http://omamorifromjapan.blogspot.jp/2011/09/kesobumi-love-letter.html
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Poem of the Pillow and other stories
Gian Carlo Calza
An intimate, provocative collection of the most famous and infamous scenes and stories of sensual pleasure told by the masters of Japanese erotic art – now available in paperback
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Poem of the Pillow and Other Stories examines the artistic developments of Japanese erotic art from the ukiyo-e period, dating from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Known by the delicate euphemism of Shunga or ‘spring images’, these pictures were hugely popular and admired, and are today highly collectable works of art.
This book illustrates major Shunga works from important ukiyo-e masters such as Utamaro, Hokusai, Harunobu, Kunisada, Kuniyoshi and many others. World-renowned scholar Gian Carlo Calza defines these fascinating erotic works in their social, historical and artistic context, providing a broad overview of a subject that is extremely nuanced and intriguing. Beautifully illustrated with over 300 images, including woodblock prints, scrolls and paintings, this book is a perfect introduction to ukiyo-e erotic art.
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PHAIDON
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