Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection

Gallery view of the special exhibition Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection.

Painting Edo — the largest exhibition ever presented at the Harvard Art Museums — offers a window onto the supremely rich visual culture of Japan’s early modern era. Selected from the unparalleled collection of Robert S. and Betsy G. Feinberg, the more than 120 works in the exhibition connect visitors with a seminal moment in the history of Japan, as the country settled into an era of peace under the warrior government of the shoguns and opened its doors to greater engagement with the outside world. The dizzying array of artistic lineages and studios active during the Edo period (1615–1868) fueled an immense expansion of Japanese pictorial culture that reverberated not only at home, but subsequently in the history of painting in the West. In an act of extraordinary generosity, the Feinbergs have promised their collection of more than three hundred works to the Harvard Art Museums.

Floating Worlds
Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the “floating world” (ukiyo) of Edo’s licensed brothel and theater districts, took contemporaneity as their chief subject. Ukiyo-e painters drew on the lively visual infill of conventional large-scale genre paintings, bringing small groups or individual figures from the background into the spotlight. By isolating idealized beauties and Kabuki actors against often neutral backgrounds, they were also able to distill the charisma of these newly fashionable subjects into paintings that engaged viewers by creating a fictive sense of participation or voyeurism. While based on actual festivities and leisure activities, floating-world pictures are premised on a communal fantasy in which the strictures of Tokugawa society and the realities of the indentured lives of Edo’s entertainers are displaced by the celebration of pleasures taken in the fleeting present moment.