Erotica in Art

 


" In art, immorality cannot exist.
Art is always sacred"

                                                      August Rodin

 


Japan
 

Japanese erotic art is generally regarded as reaching a peak during the Edo period, 1600-1868; Edo refers to the small fishing town which was to succeed the old city of Kyoto as capital of Japan and which was to become the Tokyo of today. The Edo period saw a quite unparalleled development of erotic art and literature, one consequence of which was that the Japanese government started to take an interest in censorship

The Tokugawa, or Edo, period

A movement that paralleled and occasionally intersected with the aforementioned developments in painting was that of the production of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” which depicted the buoyant, fleeting pleasures of thecommon people. This specialized area of visual representation was born in the late 16th and early 17th centuries as part of a widespread interest in representing aspects of burgeoning urban life. Depictions of the brothel quarters and Kabuki theatre dominated the subject matter of ukiyo-e until the early 19th century, when landscape and bird-and-flower subjects became popular. These subjects were represented in both painting and woodblock print form.

Woodblock printing had been a comparatively inexpensive method of reproducing image and text monopolized by the Buddhist establishment for purposes of proselytization sincethe 8th century. For more than 800 years no other single societal trend or movement had demonstrated a need for this relatively simple technology. Thus, in the first half of the17th century, painters were the principal interpreters of the demimonde. The print format was used primarily for production of erotica and inexpensive illustrated novellas, reflecting the generally low regard in which print art was held. This perhaps resulted from the idea that the artist, when creating a painting, was essentially the producer and master of his own work. However, when engaged in woodblock print production, the artist was more accurately classified as the designer, who had been commissioned and was often directly supervised by the publisher, usually the impresario of a studio or other commercial enterprise.

The simplest prints were made from ink monochrome drawings, on which the artist sometimes noted suggestions for colour. The design was transferred by a skilled carver to acherry or boxwood block and carved in relief. A printer made impressions on paper from the inked block, and the individual prints could then be hand-coloured if desired. Printing in multiple colours required more blocks and a precise printing method so that registration would match exactly from block to block. Additional flourishes such as theuse of mica, precious metals, and embossing further complicated the task. Thus, while the themes and images of the floating world varied little whether in painting or print, the production method for prints involved many more anonymous and critical talents than those of the artist-designer whose name was usually printed on the single sheet, and the mass-produced prints were considered relatively disposable despite the high level of artistry that was frequently achieved. Nevertheless, with the exponentialincrease in literacy in the early Edo period and with the vast new patronage for images of the floating world—a clientele and subject matter not previously serviced by any of the traditional ateliers—mass production was necessary, and new schools and new techniques responded to the market.

In the last quarter of the 17th century, bold ink monochrome prints with limited hand-colouring began to appear. “The Insistent Lover” by Sugimura Jihei (fl. c. 1681–1703) providesan excellent example of the lush and complex mood achievable with the medium. Within a seemingly uncomplicated composition Jihei represents a tipsy brothel guest lunging for a courtesan while an attendant averts her eyes. This scene, likely played out hundreds of times each evening in the urban licensed quarters, skillfully suggests the multileveled social games, including feigned shock and artful humouring of the insistent guest, that prevailed in the floating world. This print, too, with an almost naive representational quality, is an example of the generally straightforward, exuberant mood of the times in regard to the necessary indulgences.

From the late 17th until the mid-18th century, except for some stylistic changes and the addition of a few printed, rather than hand-applied, colours, print production remained basically unchanged. The technical capacity to produce full-colour, or polychrome, prints (nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”) was known but so labour-intensive as to be uneconomical until the 1760s, when Suzuki Harunobu (1725?–70), whose patrons were within the shogun's circle, was commissioned to produce a so-called calendar print. Calendar manufacture was a government monopoly, but privately produced works were common. Seeking to avert any censorship, the private calendars were disguised within innocent-looking pictures. Harunobu's young woman rescuing a garment from the line as a shower bursts is an example of the technique. The ideograms for the year 1765 are part of the hanging kimono's pattern. More importantly, the work is a full-colour print. Even though it was commissioned for limited distribution, it excited general audiences to the possibilities of expanding the repertoire and appearance of woodblock prints. Harunobu's productions, through the end of the decade, elegantly suggested the new possibilities. His work so raised the level of consumer expectation that publishers began to enter full-colour production on the assumption that consumption levels would outweigh production costs. Not all prints were produced with the subtlety and care of Harunobu's, but the turn in taste toward full-colour prints, of whatever quality, was irreversible.

The last quarter of the 18th century was the heyday of the classic ukiyo-e themes: the fashionable beauty and the actor. Katsukawa Shunshō (1726–92) and his pupils dominated the actor print genre. His innovative images clearly portrayed actors not as interchangeable bodies with masks but as distinctive personalities whose postures and colourfully made-up faces were easily recognizable to the viewer. Masters at portraying feminine beauty included Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815) and Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806). Both idealized the female form, observing it in virtually all its poses, casual and formal. Utamaro's bust portraits, while hardly meeting a Western definition of portraiture, were remarkable in the emotional moods they conveyed. A mysterious artist active under the name of Tōshūsai Sharakuproduced stunning actor images from 1794 to 1795, but littleelse is known of him.

At the close of the 18th century, a palpable tightening of government censorship control and perhaps a shift in public interest from the intense introspection provided by artists ofthe demimonde forced publishers to search for other subject matter. Landscape became a theme of increasing interest. In Edo the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), who as a young man trained with Katsukawa Shunshō, broke with the atelier system and experimented successfully with new subjects and styles. In the 1820s and '30s, when he was already a man of some age, Hokusai created the hugely popular print series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji. Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858) followed with another landscape-travelogue series, Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which offered scenes of the towns and way stations on the central highway connecting Edo and Kyōto. Both these and other artists capitalized on public interest in scenes of distant places. These landscape prints in some way assuaged the restrictive travel codes enforced by the shogunate and allowed viewers imaginative journeys.

Hokusai was also an important painter. His energetic rendering of the Thunder God is a fine example of the quirky and amusing quality of his figural painting. A characteristic swiftly modulating brush defines the figure, and light cast from an unseen source, perhaps lightning, allows for a play of light and shadow over the figure to model a sense of body volume. All the more remarkable is the fact that Hokusai wasin his 88th year when he painted this vigorous work.

Hiroshige painted as well, but his legacy is a vast number of prints celebrating scenes of a Japan soon to vanish. His “View from Komagata Temple near Azuma Bridge” is part of a series of 100 views of Edo. It demonstrates Hiroshige's finely honed abilities to effect atmosphere. The appearance of the cuckoo screeching in the sky alludes to classical poetry associated with late spring and early summer, as wellas to unrequited love, while the tiny figures and the red flag of the cosmetics vendor suggest the transitory nature of life and beauty.

The depiction of famous views allowed for their idealization and also for important experiments with composition. Fragmentary foreground elements were used effectively to frame a distant view, a point of view adopted by some European painters after their study of 19th-century Japaneseprints. Ironically, in their return to landscape and flora and fauna subjects, Japanese print arts revived the metaphoric vehicles of personal expression so familiar to the classic Japanese and Chinese painting traditions.

Although the time-tested themes of erotica, brothel, and theatre continued to be represented in 19th-century prints, an emerging taste for gothic and grotesque subjects found ample audiences as well. Historical themes were also popular, especially those that could be interpreted as critiques of contemporary politics. Ukiyo-e prints seemed to have been transformed from a celebration of pleasure to a means of widely distributing observations on social and political events. As the century closed, the print form, while active, was subsumed by the development of the newspaperillustration. This new form served many of the same purposes as prints and thus dramatically reduced the print audience, but it did not satisfy the needs of connoisseurs.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The style is known as shunga, with some of its greatest practitioners (Harunobu, Utamaro, etc.) producing large numbers of works. Painted hand scrolls were also very popular. The Chinese tradition of the erotic is extensive, with remarkable examples of the art dating back as far as the Yuan period (1280-1367). Unfortunately not much survives as a result of Mao Zedong's revisionist destruction of pre-communist art during his Great Leap Forward.

 

Shunga

The popularity of the Japanese Shunga is still increasing. They are one of the most sought after erotic art images of today and now they have finally reached the 'high Art' status as well. The Kunsthal in Rotterdam has the biggest exhibit ever created of Shunga art. The exhibit is called 'Desire of Spring, Erotic Fantasies in Edo Japan'.

The chronological overview shows us famous artworks from Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Suzuki Harunobu and others. The artworks are from different courses, both museums and private collections. Along with the Shunga there are love letters, erotic novels and kabuki theatre to bring back the taste of the erotic side of Japan from that period.

Japanese Shunga
The Japanese Shunga became populair around 1900 in the western world. At first they had a hidden existence in Europe and we do know from different courses that they were quite popular in 'artistic' Paris at that time. Some European artists, Like Vincent van Gogh are know for their love of the Shunga Prints. Van Gogh even used some ideas in his personal work. But a lot of others did collect them as well and some of the visual concepts were transform in to European art style's like Art Nouveau.

 

Erotic Shunga images
The erotic Shunga images, well we should call them pornographic, are showing us the world of the Geisha, actors and courtesans in the Edo period. The images are both explicit and humorous. But because of the graphical artistic quality it's just never embarrassing to watch them. But who knows, maybe one day they will say the same about our porn images.

 

 

Shunga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Most shunga are a type of ukiyo-e, usually executed in woodblock print format. While rare, there are extant erotic painted handscrolls which predate the Ukiyo-e movement. Translated literally, the Japanese word shunga means picture of spring; "spring" is a common euphemism for sex.


Two Lovers
The ukiyo-e movement as a whole sought to express an idealisation of contemporary urban life. Following the aesthetics of everyday life, Edo period shunga sought to express the sexual mores of the chonin in the widest variety of forms possible, and therefore depicted heterosexual and homosexual, old and young alike, as well as a wide range of fetishes. In the Edo period it was enjoyed by rich and poor, men and women, and despite being out of favour with the shogunate, carried very little stigma. Almost all ukiyo-e artists made shunga at some point in their careers, and it didn't affect their prestige as artists. Classifying shunga as a kind of medieval pornography can be misleading in this respect.


Katsushika Hokusai

History
Shunga has its origins in China. It is thought that shunga were initially inspired by illustrations in Chinese medical manuals, a process which had its origins in the Muromachi era (1336 to 1573). Zhou Fang, the great T'ang Dynasty Chinese erotic painter, is thought to also have been influential. He, like many erotic artists of his time and place, tended to exaggerate the size of the genital organs, a common shunga topos. While the literal meaning of the word, 'shunga,' is significant, it is in fact a contraction of, 'shunkyu-higa,' the Japanese name for Chinese sets of twelve scrolls depicting the twelve sexual acts that the crown prince had to carry out as an expression of yin-yang.

In Japan, Shunga goes back to the Heian period. At this point it was the reserve of the courtier class. Through the medium of narrative handscrolls, sexual scandals from the imperial court or the monasteries were depicted, and the characters tended to be limited to courtiers and monks.

The style reached its apex in the Edo period (1603 to 1867). Thanks to woodblock printing techniques, the quantity and quality increased dramatically. There were repeated governmental attempts to suppress shunga, the first of which was an edict issued by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1661 banning, among other things, erotic books known as kōshokubon (好色本, kōshokubon?). While other genres covered by the edict, such as works criticising daimyo or samurai, were driven underground by this edict, Shunga continued to be produced with little difficulty. The 1722 edict was much more strict, banning the production of all new books unless the city commissioner gave permission, and after this edict Shunga went underground. However, since for several decades following this edict publisher's guilds saw fit to send their members repeated reminders not to sell erotica, it seems probable that production and sale continued to flourish.

The art of shunga provided an inspiration for the Shōwa and Heisei, or modern, period art known in the Western world as hentai, and known (formally) in Japan as 'jū hachi kin' (literally, "18-restricted", or adult-only) anime and manga. Like shunga, hentai is sexually explicit in its imagery.

Shunga finally succumbed to the introduction of erotic photographs at the beginning of the Meiji era (1868—1912).

Production
Shunga were produced between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century by ukiyo-e artists, since they sold more easily and at a higher price than their ordinary work. Shunga prints were produced and sold either as single sheets or—more frequently—in book form, called enpon. These customarily contained twelve images, a tradition with its roots in Chinese shunkyu higa. Shunga was also produced in hand scroll format, called kakemono-e (掛け物絵). This format was also popular, though more expensive as the scrolls had to be individually painted.

The quality of shunga art varies, and few ukiyo-e painters remained aloof from the genre. Experienced artists found it to their advantage to concentrate on their production. This led to the appearance of shunga by first rate artists. Ukiyo-e artists owed a stable livelihood to such customs, and it appears that producing a piece of shunga for a high-ranking client brought them enough money to live on for about six months.

Full-colour printing, or nishiki-e, wasn't invented until 1765, and a lot of shunga predates this. Prior to this, colour could be added to monochrome prints by hand, and from 1744 beni-zuri-e allowed the production of prints of limited colours. Even after 1765 a lot of shunga was produced using older methods. In some cases this was to keep the cost low, but in many cases this was a matter of taste.

Shunga produced in Edo tended to be more richly coloured than that produced in Kyoto and Osaka, mainly owing to a difference in aesthetic taste between these regions—Edo has a taste for novelty and luxury, while the kamigata region preferred a more muted, understated style. This also translates into a greater amount of background detail in Edo Shunga.

After 1722 most artists refrained from signing shunga works. However, between 1761 and 1786 the implementation of printing regulations became more relaxed, and many artists took to concealing their name as a feature of the picture (such as calligraphy on a fan held by a courtesan) or allusions in the work itself (such as Utamaro's enpon entitled, 'Utamakura.')

Content
Edo period shunga sought to express a varied world of contemporary sexual possibilities. Many writers on the subject refer to this as the creation of a 'pornotopia,' a world parallel to contemporary urban life, but idealised, eroticised and fantastical.

Characters
Possibly the most common character of shunga was the courtesan. Utamaro was particularly revered for his depictions of courtesans, which offered an unmatched level of sensitivity and psychological nuance. Tokugawa courtesans could be described as the celebrities of their day, and Edo's pleasure district, Yoshiwara, is often compared to Hollywood. Men saw them as highly eroticised due to their profession, but at the same time unattainable, since only the wealthiest, most cultured men would have any chance of sexual relations with one. Women saw them as distant, glamorous idols, and the fashions for the whole of Japan were inspired by the fashions of the courtesan. For these reasons the fetish of the courtesan appealed to many.

Works depicting courtesans have since been criticised for painting an idealised picture of life in the pleasure quarters. It has been argued that they masked the situation of virtual slavery that sex workers lived under. However, Utamaro is just one example of an artist who was sensitive to the inner life of the courtesan, for example, showing them wistfully dreaming of escape from Yoshiwara through marriage.

Similarly, kabuki actors are often depicted, many of whom worked as male gigolos. These carried the same fetish of the sex worker, with the added quality of them often being quite young. They are often shown with samurai. Aside from this were the ordinary chonin, and occasionally Dutch or Portuguese foreigners.

Stories
Unlike the painted handscrolls, enpon did not portray a running storyline. However, more often than not, shunga images portray an interesting situation. A whole variety of possibilities are shown—men seduce women, women seduce men; men and women cheat on each other; all ages from virginal teenagers to old married couples; even octopuses were occasionally featured.

While most shunga was heterosexual many depicted male-on-male trysts. Woman-on-woman was a rare feature but there are extant works depicting this. Masturbation was also depicted. The perception of sexuality differed, of course, in Tokugawa Japan from that in the modern Western world, and people were less likely to associate with one particular sexual preference. For this reason the many sexual pairings depicted were a matter of providing as much variety as possible.

The backstory to shunga prints can be found in accompanying text or dialogue in the picture itself, and in props in the background. Symbolism also featured widely, such as the use of plum blossoms to represent virginity or tissues to symbolise impending ejaculation.

Clothing
In almost all shunga the characters are fully clothed. This is primarily because nudity was not inherently erotic in Tokugawa Japan - people were used to seeing the opposite sex naked in communal baths. It also served an artistic purpose; it helped the reader identify courtesans and foreigners, the prints often contained symbolic meaning, and it drew attention to the parts of the body that were revealed, ie, the genitalia.

Lack of realism
Shunga couples are often shown in unrealistic positions with exaggerated genitalia. Explanations for this include increased visibility of the sexually explicit content, artistic interest and psychological impact: that is, the genitalia is interpreted as a 'second face,' expressing the primal passions that the everyday face is obligated by girl to conceal, and is therefore the same size as the head and placed unnaturally close to it by the awkward position.

Audience
Shunga was probably enjoyed by both men and women of all classes. Superstitions and customs surrounding shunga suggest as much; in the same way that it was considered a lucky charm against death for a samurai to carry shunga, it was considered a protection against fire in merchant warehouses and the home. From this we can deduce that samurai, chonin, and housewives all owned shunga. All three of these groups would suffer separation from the opposite sex; the samurai lived in barracks for months at a time, and conjugal separation resulted from the sankin kotai system and the merchants' need to travel to obtain and sell goods. It is therefore argued that this superstition was euphemistic in nature, and ownership of shunga was not superstitious, but libidinous in nature.

It was traditional to buy newly married couples shunga. This and records of women obtaining it themselves from booklenders tells us that women were avid consumers of it. Shunga may have served as sexual guidance for the sons and daughters of wealthy families. This has been disputed since the instructional nature of shunga is limited by the impossible positions and lack of description of technique, and there were sexual manuals in circulation that offered clearer guidance, including advice on hygiene.

Shunga varied greatly in quality and price. Some of it was highly elaborate, commissioned by wealthy merchants and daimyo. Some of it was limited in colour, widely circulated, and cost little more than a bowl of noodles. Enpon were available through the lending libraries, or kashi-honya, that travelled in rural areas. This tells us that shunga reached all classes of society—peasant, chonin, samurai and daimyo.

 
 


Keisai Eisen
1790-1848