Untitled (EDO Series)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Lillian Feldman Schwartz

1989

Description

While living in Japan in the 1950s, Lillian Schwartz collected a large number of woodcut prints by the artists Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1753–1806). They all created images of ukiyo-e, or “the floating world”—the transient, pleasure-filled life of Edo-period Japan. Schwartz was interested in how such Japanese prints had spread to Europe in the 19th century, influencing the visual style of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She extended this process of artistic exchange in this work, for which she manipulated Utamaro’s woodblock print Naniwa Okita Admiring Herself in a Mirror (c.1790–95) with a computer program. Likely produced with the early image-editing software Pico, the print features bold overpainted colors and a triangular middle section which seems spliced, morphed, or sampled from another source.