The Akira Katayama Collection Ukiyo-e | Vernissage

By invitation only.

Businessman and philanthropist Akira Katayama is a living cultural bridge between the Japanese and German worlds. He has been at home in both since 1959. His collection of Japanese xylographs is a look from the German world back to historical Japan.

The “Pictures of the Floating World“ being a genre of Japanese painting and woodblock print provide a significant key to the understanding of the Japan of the Edo era before 1860, with its life, art and culture. Besides famous woodblock prints the Akira Katayama Collection contains a compilation of rather important ones of these typical, complex snapshots of sometimes ordinary situations and constellations.

Other than the art of drawing before, which had focused on picturing humans, Ukiyo-e started to include landscapes, crafting, fashion and snapshot perspectives on contemporary sceneries. During the Kabun era (1661-72) the genre of Japanese xylographs allowed a glance at courtesans and actors and actresses that impressed with magnificent and opulent robes. From 1765 it was also possible to produce the prints with a range of colours giving them an additional layer of expression. At the turn of the 18th and 19th century the focus of the woodprint artists moved from actors and actresses, women and courtesans back to seasonal and landscape sceneries with Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) being the most well-known representatives. The Tokugawa shogunate marks the end of this golden age of Ukiyo-e, a Japanese picture printing genre in which the expression of previous developments of Japanese arts, as particularly represented in Kabuki and Nō theater, the social self-image and the perception of technical, military and artistic developments culminated.