Strong Women, Beautiful Men: Japanese portrait prints from the Toledo Museum of Art

Strong Women, Beautiful Men celebrates the Toledo Museum of Art's extensive Japanese woodblock print collection, which is remarkable for its pristine condition. Thanks to gracious collaboration with print designer and publisher Hiroshi Yoshida, the Museum presented two important exhibitions in the 1930s of shin hanga, or modern Japanese prints. examples of most of these prints entered the collection, augmenting a smaller group of eighteenth-and nineteenth century works. Curator Carolyn M. Putney and scholar Laura J. Mueller selected fifty prints to examine the changing appearance of the human figure and the evolving approach to portraiture. the selection includes examples that range from black-and-white illustrated books buy Nishikawa Sukenobu in the early eighteenth century through to full-color portraits by the modern masters Hashiguchi Goyo and Natori Shunsen. Images of celebrities are spotlighted, including renowned courtesans and beautiful women (bijin-ga) and famous kabuki actors (yakusha-e). Artists, carvers, printers, and publishers inventively used caricature, parody, stylization, and physiognomy in order to create compelling images that appealed to an increasingly competitive market.