Dreams & Diversions ─ Essays on Japanese Woodblock Prints

This collection of essays presents stories and histories drawn from The San Diego Museum of Art's previously unpublished holdings of more than one thousand Japanese woodblock prints. The international team of authors underscores the special and longstanding connections between the port city of San Diego, its collectors, and the nation of Japan. The essays not only advance the field with new discoveries recent research, and discussions of rare prints but also engage general readers interested in Japanese art and culture of the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries.

Unfolding with a history of the transnational experiences of Japanese people in San Diego and the ownership histories of a core group of prints that can be traced to the collections of a reclusive Midwestern philanthropist and a turn-of-the-century English aristocrat, this volume reveals how both Japanese people and prints were received in the West after Japan's borders were opened in 1854. The book then continues with a concise history of Ukiyo-e, illustrated solely with prints from the Museum's collection, written by a pioneering scholar with more than fifty years' experience in the field. The subsequent essays feature little-discussed topics, such as scrapbook prints and Yokohama prints, that illuminate the particularities of how Ukiyo-e developed through the nineteenth century. The final essay presents groundbreaking new insights into the development of Meiji and modern landscape prints from the 1890's to 1920's by a leading Japanese scholar, here set forth in English for the first time.

Andreas Marks is the Director and Chief Curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California.

Sonya Rhie Quintanilla is the Curator of Asian Art at The San Diego Museum of Art.