The exhibition of Japanese prints from the Akinsha Ukiyo-e Collection, Pictures of the Floating World, was opened on Saturday, November 14th 0f 2009, at 7:30 p.m. at the Art Pavilion Juraj Šporer, in the organization of the Croatian Museum of Tourism.
The Akinsha Ukiyo-e Collection is the largest and most prominent exhibition of Ukiyo-e art in Croatia so far. This is a unique collection of woodblock prints owned by the Ukrainian art historian and collector Konstantin Akinsha.
The process of creating an Ukiyo-e woodblock print, on the other hand, is unique because it involves three separate experts: the artist who draws the sketch, the woodcarver who carves it onto a wooden panel and the printer who prints it onto paper and creates the final product. The woodcarver creates a separate wooden panel for every color, based on the artist’s design. The artist, therefore, must use as few colors and wooden panels as possible in order to reduce the manufacturing cost. This is the reason that Ukiyo-e artists created astonishing effects with a very limited color spectrum.
Japanese prints had a strong presence in the West during the second half of the 19th century. They made a significant impact on the Impressionist, the Viennese Secession style and poster design and they are a key element to understanding the development of modern western art. The European triumph of the prints on the rice paper coincided with the glorious days of Abbazia – the Kabuki actors and beauties depicted by Utagawa were equally important cultural attribute of “the twilight of the Habsburg Empire” as the hotel Kvarner. On the one hand they belong to culture of the remote Japanese islands, from another to the epoch which shaped Opatija, one of the most beautiful summer resorts of the end of the 19th century.
The exhibition in Opatija was open until December 8th of 2009.
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