Japanese Prints from the Arizona State University Art Museum
The ASU Art Museum serves a diverse community of artists and audiences through innovative programming that is interdisciplinary, educational and relevant to life today. The Jules Heller Print Study Room at the ASU Art Museum provides a secure environment for care and storage for more than 6000 prints in the collection while also being an accessible resource for students and public. An average of 600 students visit the Jules Heller Print Study Room during the academic year. To further assist the educational experience, on display are examples of tools used to create the prints and the Curator of Prints is available to explain the tools and print making processes to students, professors and scholars. Classes and individual students have participated in the origination and research of exhibitions from our Japanese print holdings: Lasting Impressions: Japanese Prints from the ASU Art Museum (Aug. 28 – Nov. 27, 2010); Legends and Myths in Japanese Kabuki Prints (Feb. 11 – Sept. 29, 2012); and, Echoes of Japan: Prints by Western Women (Jan. 3 – May 17, 2014). By digitizing the Japanese print collection; and placing it in the Library's digital repository will expand and support our interdisciplinary and educational focus in Japanese art, making it available to a much broader audience than just the museum visitor. This is a collaboration between ASU Libraries, the ASU Art Museum, and ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
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- Creators: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
- Creators: Hasegawa Sumi
A young girl comes to the assistance of a wounded soldier who is hiding in a barn. The text on the left, 少女 の 仁心 士君子 も 及ば さる 所 あり, roughly translates to "the kindness of a little girl is sometimes better than what even a virtuous man can do." Part of a Meiji-period series of didactic prints.
Between 1886 and 1888, Yoshitoshi drew a series of illustrated short biographies of contemporary personages that were issued as supplements in the Yamato Shinbun newspaper.
The black flag at the upper right corner contains the series name. The scroll at the upper left contains a text description of the print, including the title, Kurofuda (black plank), referring to the black wooden plank to the right of the stage. When a member of the audience needed to be paged, their name would be written on this plank.
This print gives a glimpse into a kabuki theater. A stage assistant beats long wooden clappers (hyoshigi or ki) to accentuate the opening of the curtain and the start of the performance. Another assistant is waiting to strike slightly shorter clappers (tsuke) against a board placed on the floor to emphasize other onstage actions such as running, fighting, or mie (striking a powerful, emotional pose). It also gives a glimpse of the audience and while some appear to be attentive to the action on stage, others are also talking, looking at notes and even entertaining a baby.
This is one print from a calendar series describing events in Edo Kabuki theater. The black emblem in the top right corner tells the title of the series; the scroll holds text explaining the theatrical event. This print was made during the Meiji period (1868-1912), but stems from a long history of calendar printmaking. The title Sashidashi Kantera literally means “reaching-out lantern.” The man on the right is holding a candle with a reflector on a long, flexible bamboo pole to light up the face of the actor.
