The eponymous exhibition commemorating the 130th year since the death of Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-89) at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is the latest in a crescendo of Kyosai exhibitions. The 200-odd works on show celebrate the eccentric painter and printmaker¡¯s pictorial diversity produced within 19th-century Japan¡¯s social restructuring and modernizing tumult.
The crests and troughs of Kyosai¡¯s reputation are almost alarming. An overachieving infant, he sketched at age 3, studied ukiyo-e with Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) from 7 and joined the Surugadai branch of the late-traditional Kano school of painting at age 10.
Ukiyo-e and Kano practices did not usually go hand in hand. The former was often used by Kyosai for coruscating satire. ¡°Repelling of the Mongol Pirate Ships¡± (1863), for example, depicts the Mongol invasions of the Kamakura Period (1185-1333), while alluding to a contemporary attack by Choshu clan forces on an American merchant ship anchored in the Shimonoseki Straits.
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