Kuniyoshi Exhibit: Royal Academy Of Arts

Last week at work, I began flexing again.  That means that I work an extra hour each day and get every other Friday off!  Before my surgery, since I found even simple every-day activities exhausting, I spent most of my flex days just napping around the house and recovering in general from the week.  But now that i'm feeling healthy and energized again, i'm trying to take better advantage of London on my Fridays off.  

This Friday, I headed down to the Kuniyoshi Exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts.

I took a class on Japanese Art in college (in the same semester I took a class on Japanese Cinema, it was a bit of a Japan overload) and really enjoyed it.  While I find Western European art horribly boring until about the 19th century, Japanese art is interesting to me regardless of its age.  

According to the Royal Academy: "Kuniyoshi was a major master of the ‘floating world’, or Ukiyo-e school of Japanese art, and, together with Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864), dominated nineteenth century printmaking in Japan. Prolific and multitalented, Kuniyoshi considerably expanded the existing repertoire of the school, particularly with thousands of designs that brought vividly to life famous military exploits in Japan and China. Kuniyoshi developed an extraordinarily powerful and imaginative style in his prints, often spreading a scene dynamically across all three sheets of the traditional triptych format and linking the composition with one bold unifying element - a major artistic innovation."

This was my favourite Kuniyoshi print.  The colors were much more vibrant in person.

While the exhibit was very well done, I have to say, I didn't enjoy it very much.  Not because of the prints themselves, which I enjoyed very much, but due the general atmosphere.  First of all, I had to pay 9 pounds to get in.  For some reason, I resent having to pay to go to museums.  London, as do most cities, has some very good free ones, so why pay?  Secondly, it was WAY too crowded.  I thought I would be ok, as it was a weekday, but I was wrong.  The exhibit was crammed into 4 smallish rooms and there were probably about 120 people trying to view it at the same time as me.  This meant I wasn't able to follow the flow of the exhibit, but had to skip around to open sections to avoid the crowds.  Lastly, even with a little bit of knowledge on Japanese Art, I didn't really understand most of what the descriptions were talking about.  Maybe this is my fault?  Maybe I should have done some research on this period of time in Japanese history before going?  But they were just throwing names around like I should know who they were talking about.  A little more background information would have been helpful.    

 

I did enjoy Kuniyoshi's work, but I doubt if i'll be making a trip back to the Royal Academy of Arts on my next Flex Friday.