Warriors, Ghosts & Cats

Sixteen woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi — the great late-Edo ukiyo-e master who specialized in heroic warriors, supernatural horror, and mischievous cats. Kuniyoshi worked in 1830s and 1840s Edo at the peak of Japanese popular print culture, and his imagination ran wilder than any of his contemporaries. His series of the 108 Heroes of the Suikoden — fugitive warriors covered in elaborate dragon and tiger tattoos — touched off a tattoo craze in Edo that has not died down two centuries later. His ghost prints are among the most terrifying images in Japanese art: the giant skeleton of Princess Takiyasha looms over a samurai through a torn paper screen; the vengeful spirit of Oiwa, her face hideously disfigured, materializes from a paper lantern; warriors fight enormous catfish and monstrous serpents. And then there are the cats. Kuniyoshi loved cats — he kept many — and produced print after print of cats dressed as kabuki actors, cats forming the syllabary of the kana alphabet, cats engaged in entirely human dramas. This collection presents his most celebrated images of warriors, ghosts, and cats — work that influenced Western artists from Whistler to Toulouse-Lautrec and still feels electric today.