In 1918, Frank Lloyd Wright was taken to see a cache of ukiyo-e prints in a secret location outside Tokyo. Believing that it was a collection of pristine impressions, he bought the lot. Soon he learned that he had been deceived: his dealer, Hayashi Kyūgo, had sold him worn, faded impressions that had their color reprinted in order to pass as originals. These “revamps” were traced to the studio of Takamizawa Enji, a renowned restorer as well as the era’s most capable fabricator. In this talk, I will place this episode within the larger frame of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reproduction practices, a time when the terms of authenticity were challenged by replication, refabrication, and reproduction. By tracing Takamizawa’s trajectory from suspected forger to his restitution as the producer of approved reproductions, this talk synthesizes the career of this master artisan within his period context. This case study further demonstrates that authenticity crises in ukiyo-e didn’t arise because reproduction broke the medium’s rules—rather, the problem became the ways that shifting regimes of value framed the question of what was an “original print” within the modern market for ukiyo-e.

About the speaker

Julie Nelson Davis is the Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of History of Art and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on Japanese prints, illustrated books, and paintings, and she is the author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (2007, 2021), Partners in Print (2014), and Picturing the Floating World (2021), and co-editor of Arthur Tress and the Japanese Illustrated Book (2022), among others. This talk comes from her forthcoming book, The Ghost in the Brush: Invention and Authority in Ukiyo-e.

Meer informatie: Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies