Utagawa Hiroshige: The Moon Reflected * * * * *
Ikon Gallery, Brindleyplace
Review by Terry Grimley
Somewhere near the top of my list of Christmas treats in Birmingham this year is this ravishing exhibition.
Ikon usually concerns itself with the recent and up-to-the-minute, so it's something quite out of the normal run of events to see the entire first floor devoted to a great master of the 1850s.
The explanation is that this exhibition of Hiroshige's late prints from the British Museum has been selected by the artist Julian Opie, himself the subject of a major retrospective at Ikon in 2001.
Opie's work is concerned with depicting landscape and figures in a radicallysimplified, almost diagrammatic, style. His work is familiar to a huge audience thanks to his cover design for Blur's Greatest Hits album.
It's not difficult to see why Hiroshige's work would interest him, and his take on one of the great masters of the Japanese woodblock print is explored in a conversation with Timothy Clark, head of the British Museum's Japanese section, which is transcribed in the handsome catalogue.
Opie's preference is for the later series in which Hiroshige emerged more clearly from the influence of his predecessor Hokusai, switching his landscapes from a horizontal to a vertical format.
The three series making up the exhibition are Famous Views of the Sixty-Odd Provinces, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji. There is more to take in than you can easily manage on a single visit, and the prints look fantastic here.
Despite their fragility, their colours have a tremendous resonance. In Pine Groves of Miho, Sufruga from Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, for instance, the bars of deep ultramarine top and bottom which are a stylisation of these prints are juxtaposed with startling frankness with the flat yellow of the sky.
The urban locations of Edo (modern Tokyo) contain the most variety and anecdotal incident. These prints seem familiar either because they are - they include some of the most celebrated and frequently reproduced images of the 19th century - or because their style was so influential on early European modernism as to seem part of our immediate visual environment.
Plum Estate, Kameido, was actually copied by Van Gogh, but it is difficult to look at Hatsune Horse-riding Grounds, Bakuro-cho, with its figure in the middle-distance returning our gaze, without also thinking of Van Gogh.
I'd always thought of the random framing in Degas' paintings as deriving from photography, but it is never more audacious than in Distant View of Kinryyzan Temple, where a geisha sitting in a boat in the foreground is almost completely cut off by the frame. The structure of the boat itself, at a first glance, looks like a fragment
of urban motorway viaduct. Everywhere you look there is fascinating detail and brilliant craftsmanship. A special delight is the inclusion of several sketchbooks, dating from around 1848, a decade or so earlier than the prints. Free of the stylised printmaking technique the medium provides a bridge between east and west, and brings into sharp focus Hiroshige's curiosity about the teeming human life around him.
Until January 20 (Tue-Sun 11am-6pm; admission free).
