Author: KEYES, ROGER S.
Title: Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan
Description: The New York Publish Library in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle and London. 2006, 1st Edition. (ISBN: 9780295986241). Hardcover. Book, English text; Hardcover (with dust jacket); 24 x 31.5 cm; 1.8 kg; 320 pages with colour illustrations.; Used with signs of wear on the dust jacket, which shows edge wear, and a few wear marks on the front cover, spine and back cover. The spine is slightly faded. Minor signs of wear on the interior.; Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan presented at The New York Public Library Humanities and Social Sciences Library D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall and the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery from October 20, 2006 to February 4 2007.; Ehon or "picture books," in Japanese-are part of an incom- parable 1,230-year-old Japanese tradition. Created by artists and craftsmen, most ehon also feature essays, poems, or other texts written in beautiful, distinctive calligraphy. They are by nature collaborations: visual artists, calligraphers, writers, and designers join forces with papermakers, binders, block cutters, and printers. The books they create are strikingly beautiful, highly charged microcosms of deep feeling, sharp intensity, and extraordinary intelligence. In the elegant, richly illustrated Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan, renowned scholar Roger S. Keyes traces the history and evolution of these remarkable books through seventy key works, including many great rarities and unique masterpieces, from the Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library, one of the fore- most collections of Japanese illustrated books in the West. The earliest ehon were made as religious offerings or talismans, but the great flowering of ehon began in the early modern period (1600-1868) and has continued, with new media and new styles and subjects, to the present. Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the Ebb Tide, 1789; often called The Shell Book) by Kitagawa Utamaro, one of the supreme achievements of the ehon tradition, is reproduced in full here. Michimori (ca. 1604), a luxuriously produced libretto for a No play, is also featured, as are Saito Shuho's cheerful Kishi enpu (Mr. Ginger's Book of Love, 1803), Kamisaka Sekka's brilliant Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds, 1910), and many more. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan ends with ehon by some of the most innovative practitioners of the twentieth century. Among these are Chizu (The Map, 1965), Kawada Kikuji's profound photographic requiem for Hiroshima; Yoko Tawada and Stephan Kohler's affecting Ein Gedicht für ein Buch (A Poem for a Book, 1996); and Vija Celmins and Eliot Weinberger's Hoshi (The Stars), published in 2005. The magnificent ehon tradition originated in Japan and developed there under very specific conditions, but it has long since burst its bounds, like any living tradition. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan suggests that when artists meet readers in these contrived, protected, focused, sacred book "worlds," the possibilities for pleasure, insight, and inspiration are limitless. Good/No Jacket.

Keywords: 9780295986241 japan,wxhibition,illustrated books,picture books Collections and exhibitions Asian Art


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