Edo Popular Art in the Age of Great Transformation

Image: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Princess Takiyasha Summons a Skeleton Specter to Frighten Mitsukuni (detail), mid-1840s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Joan Elizabeth Tanney Bequest, © 2014 Museum Associates/LACMA

Sunday, December 7, 2014 3:30pm 

LACMA, Brown Auditorium
5905 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Katsuya Hirano, associate professor of history at UCLA, presents "Edo Popular Art in the Age of Great Transformation." In this lecture, Professor Hirano addresses why the powerful Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan (1603–1868) tried so hard to regulate the popular art of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within Edo's cultural works—which exposed contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly transforming realities—by examining objects made by late 18th- to early 19th-century artists and writers that celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with street life. Interweaving art, history, politics, and economics, Professor Hirano offers a novel account of a country in the process of radical transformation—and of the intensely creative culture at the center of it.

Admission
Free and open to the public, reservations required.

Reservations, call 323 857-6565

RSVP by Monday, December 1

For additional details, visit LACMA Website.