Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e was art the townspeople of Edo could actually buy — probably the most democratic picture-making the world has seen. A publisher planned it, an artist drew it, a carver cut the blocks, a printer pulled the prints: division of labor as an invention for delivering beauty at scale. Around 1765, an exchange circle for illustrated calendars gave rise to full-color nishiki-e prints, and the heat of ordinary demand kept producing stars — Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, Tōshūsai Sharaku (active for only ten months), Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige. Then in 1867, these prints officially crossed the sea to the Paris World's Fair and changed how the Impressionists saw. The famous story that they arrived by accident, as wrapping paper around ceramics, is now considered a well-known tale without solid evidence behind it. I like to think they were not carried over by accident at all — they were sent to be seen, on purpose. That seems to suit the pride of these pictures better. That is my own reading. One more thing, while I am at it: Japan did this again. About a century later, the postwar avant-garde group Gutai also sent its work to Paris on its own, without waiting to be discovered. Let me add a word about paint. The blue of Hokusai's wave is not a Japanese colour. Prussian blue — bero-ai, as Edo called it — is a synthetic pigment that Dutch ships carried into Nagasaki. It had arrived by the middle of the eighteenth century but was expensive; it was in the first half of the nineteenth that the price fell far enough to use it lavishly in prints. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which began appearing around 1831, is full of that newly cheap blue. Hokusai used it so much that the colour picked up a second name: Hokusai blue. The most famous blue wave in Japan was painted with a pigment from abroad. At just that moment, across the sea, paint in tubes was being invented and taking the Impressionists outdoors. New paint making new pictures, happening in the east and the west at once. And one last thought of my own. A publisher who plans the work and puts up the money, with the designer, the carver and the printer each doing their part — that arrangement looks a good deal like the editor-and-artist relationship in manga today, or an anime production committee. The Edo publisher was probably Japan's first producer.