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Sharaku Made 150 Actor Prints in Ten Months, Then Vanished
In the fifth month of 1794, kabuki fans in Edo started seeing a name they had never encountered before: Tōshūsai Sharaku. Over the following ten months, ending in the first month of 1795, the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō issued somewhere around 140 to 150 print designs under that name, almost all of them portraits of kabuki actors, with a few sumo wrestlers and warriors included. Then the prints stopped, and Sharaku vanished. No later work bears his name, no contemporary diary mentions him, and his identity is still argued over today. The strongest candidate is a minor Noh actor called Saitō Jūrōbei. Ten Months, One Publisher, About 150 Prints Japanese lunar-calendar months do not map cleanly onto Western ones, so scholars date Sharaku's debut to the fifth month of Kansei 6, which ran from 29 May to 26 June 1794. His opening batch was twenty-eight ōkubi-e, or large-head bust portraits, in the ōban sheet size, tied to plays running that month at Edo's three licensed kabuki theatres: the Miyako-za, the Kiri-za and the Kawarazaki-za. All twenty-eight were printed against mica grounds, most of them dark grey or near-black, that made the actors' faces glint under lamplight. Every print in the Sharaku catalogue, without exception, was issued by one man: Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the leading print and book publisher in Edo. No rival publisher's name appears anywhere in his output. The catalogue itself is unusually short. Reference works list him simply as "Tōshūsai Sharaku, active 1794 to 1795" because that is all that can be proven: a working name attached to a run of prints between two fixed dates, nothing before and nothing after. Even the total is an estimate. Specialists have counted as few as 140 and as many as roughly 150 designs, depending on whether preparatory drawings and disputed sheets are included in the tally. Faces Built to Unsettle The twenty-eight ōkubi-e are what made Sharaku's name, and what still draw crowds to exhibitions of his work today. Take the actor Ōtani Oniji III, shown as the servant Edobei in the play Koi Nyōbō Somewake Tazuna, staged at the Kawarazaki-za. Sharaku crops in tight on the face: a jutting nose, a curled lip, fingers spread and hooked as the character gropes toward his victim. It is not a flattering picture. It is a picture of a man performing villainy, drawn by someone more interested in the psychology of the role than in the vanity of the actor playing it. Sharaku applied the same scrutiny to heroic roles, not just villainous ones. In a companion print from the same production, Ichikawa Ebizō appears as the samurai Takemura Sadanoshin in the moment before he takes his own life to preserve his honour, hands clenched, eyes strained under the weight of the decision. Earlier designers working in bust portraiture, Katsukawa Shunkō and Shun'ei among them, had stayed closer to flattering convention. Sharaku's contemporary Utamaro was doing something related in his portraits of women, reading mood and character rather than settling for prettiness, and Sharaku pushed that same instinct further, to the edge of caricature. Tōshūsai Sharaku, Ichikawa Ebizō as Takemura Sadanoshin, 1794. Printed from the same May 1794 production as the Edobei bust. A Falling Off, Batch by Batch After the ōkubi-e, Sharaku's output declined in stages that scholars still use to divide his career into four periods. A second batch of thirty-eight designs followed in the seventh and eighth months of 1794: thirty half-length portraits on plain yellow grounds in the narrow hosoban format, and eight pairs of actors kept on the white or dark mica grounds of the debut series. A third batch, in the eleventh month of 1794, moved into hosoban and the mid-sized aiban format and is generally judged weaker again. A fourth and final batch, fifteen hosoban prints from the first month of 1795, carries a different signature form from the rest and is the least admired of the four periods. Somewhere in this run Sharaku also produced two warrior prints and at least one sumo design, minor by count but proof that Tsutaya was still willing to try him in other genres before the commissions ended for good. Why the Prints May Not Have Sold The oldest explanation for Sharaku's disappearance is commercial: his prints stopped selling. Edo's actor-print buyers generally wanted a favourite performer flattered. Sharaku gave them faces distorted by effort, vanity or malice, and later writers assumed that actors, their fans, or the theatres themselves objected. Tsutaya had reason to be careful about objections. Three years earlier, in 1791, censors enforcing the Kansei Reforms had fined him half his personal wealth over books he had published by the writer Santō Kyōden, ruled to have broken the new decency laws. A publisher already punished once for pushing too far had a clear motive to drop a designer causing him trouble a second time. Recent researchers are less certain that unpopularity explains everything. No sales record survives, and no contemporary complaint documents actors or audiences reacting against him; the idea rests mostly on inference from the prints themselves. Other explanations compete with it: that Sharaku lost the co-operation of the actors he depicted and so could no longer sit close enough to draw them, or that Tsutaya simply redirected his money toward other designers, Utamaro among them, once the novelty wore off. None of these theories has displaced the others. What is certain is that after the first month of 1795, the commissions ended. Fifty Years of Silence, Then a Name For half a century after 1795, nobody wrote down who Sharaku was. The earliest surviving attempt appears only in 1844, in an expanded edition of the Ukiyo-e Ruikō (Ukiyo-e Miscellany) revised by Saitō Gesshin. It gives Sharaku's real name as Saitō Jūrōbei and an address: Kyōbashi Hatchōbori, in what is now central Tokyo. That is the entire biographical record. No portrait of him survives, no family history, no explanation of why a name attached to roughly 150 prints should surface only after fifty years of silence. Ignored at Home, Rediscovered Abroad Sharaku's reputation did not travel well within Japan. Through the nineteenth century, Japanese writing on ukiyo-e treated him as a minor figure beside more prolific and more popular designers. What changed his standing was a book published in Munich in 1910: Sharaku, by the German art historian Julius Kurth. Kurth set the actor busts beside Rembrandt and Velázquez, arguing that Sharaku belonged among the major portraitists of any tradition, not just among ukiyo-e specialists. The book arrived at the height of Japonisme, when European collectors were already assembling print collections and looking for the next name to champion. A second, expanded edition followed in 1922. Japanese scholarship caught up afterwards, reclaiming an artist whose reputation had, by then, already been made somewhere else. The Noh Actor Theory Saitō Gesshin's 1844 identification remains the theory most specialists take seriously, and later research has added circumstantial detail to it. Saitō Jūrōbei was a Noh performer employed by the Hachisuka family, daimyō of the Awa domain (present-day Tokushima), who kept a residence in Edo at Kyōbashi Hatchōbori, matching the 1844 address exactly. Domain records show the Awa lord in Edo from the sixth day of the fourth month of 1793, then absent from the twenty-first day of the fourth month of 1794 until the second day of the fourth month of 1796, travelling to his domain under the shogunate's sankin-kōtai (alternate-attendance) system. If Jūrōbei did not have to travel with him, he would have been free in Edo for almost exactly the window in which Sharaku was active. A Noh programme from 1816 lists a performer of the same name, confirming that a Noh actor called Saitō Jūrōbei genuinely existed, though that alone does not prove he was Sharaku. Other candidates have been proposed since, none with comparable supporting detail. Most standard references now treat the identification as the leading theory rather than as settled fact. If Saitō Jūrōbei really was Sharaku, he went back to performing Noh and never designed another print. Kabuki's most unsparing portraitist worked for ten months, then chose, or was made, to disappear. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson
Agnes Martin Stopped Painting for Seven Years and Drove to Taos
In summer 1967, Agnes Martin walked out of her New York studio at the bottom of Manhattan, gave away most of her materials, sold or destroyed the canvases she had not been able to sell, bought a pickup truck and a small camping trailer, and drove west. She was fifty-five years old. She did not paint again for seven years. She had been working in New York since 1957 and had been part of the loose group of artists living at Coenties Slip, a small block of derelict buildings near the South Street Seaport. Her neighbours had included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Lenore Tawney. By 1965 her paintings were being shown at the Robert Elkon Gallery and acquired by major collectors. She had a New York reputation. She was leaving it deliberately. Saskatchewan Martin was born in 1912 in Maklin, a small farming town in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Her father died when she was two. Her mother, a strict Presbyterian, raised her and her three brothers on a small farm during the prairie depression of the 1920s and 1930s. The childhood was poor, isolated, and unhappy. Martin would later describe her mother's emotional coldness as one of the formative facts of her life. She left home as soon as she could. She trained as a teacher in Vancouver in the early 1930s, taught in rural Canadian schools, and moved to the United States in 1932 to take care of a pregnant sister. She became an American citizen in 1950. She studied painting at Columbia Teachers College in New York from 1941 to 1942 and again from 1951 to 1952, after which she moved to New Mexico for the first time and taught painting at the University of New Mexico. New York The first significant period in her painting life began in 1957, when Betty Parsons, the New York dealer, visited her in New Mexico and invited her to come to New York. Parsons, who had been Pollock's and Rothko's first dealer in the 1940s, recognised something in Martin's early gridded work and offered her a New York show. Martin moved to New York that year. She took the small loft at Coenties Slip and began producing the work that would make her reputation: large square canvases (most often 1.83 metres on a side) covered with delicately ruled grids of horizontal and vertical lines, drawn in pencil over a pale ground of oil or acrylic wash. The grids were calculated but slightly imperfect. The hand of the maker was always visible in the slight wavering of the lines and the small variations in pressure. The paintings were difficult to photograph and almost impossible to reproduce. They had to be seen in person. At close range they revealed the labour of the pencil work; at a distance of a few metres they began to fill the visual field with a kind of even, vibrating light. The paintings were neither minimalist (the hand was too visible) nor abstract expressionist (the gesture was too restrained). They occupied a position of their own. The Departure The departure from New York in 1967 was triggered by several events in close succession. Ad Reinhardt, the painter Martin most admired among her contemporaries, died in August 1967. The Coenties Slip buildings, where she had lived for ten years, were being demolished for new construction. Martin had also suffered (and would continue to suffer) from auditory hallucinations and what she described as catatonic episodes, which had brought her to McLean Hospital outside Boston for several extended stays in the early 1960s. Her doctors had diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. The combination of personal grief, the loss of the studio neighbourhood, and the strain of New York life made her decide to leave. She had been considering it for some time. The summer of 1967 was when she acted. The Seven Years For the next seven years, Martin lived in various places in New Mexico. She camped in the truck for the first year, then bought a small piece of land near the Cuba area in 1968 and built an adobe house and studio with her own hands. She did not paint. She wrote: small notebooks of meditations and prose poems, several of which would later be published. She read Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts. She listened to classical music. She lived almost entirely alone. The seven-year break has been the subject of much speculation. Martin herself, asked about it later in life, was usually opaque. She said the break had been about "wanting to think." She gave no other detailed explanation. The break should probably be understood as a deliberate strategic withdrawal: she had been working at a certain level in New York and wanted to come back to painting only when she had something different to say. A second installation view of works by Agnes Martin, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Return Martin began painting again in 1974, in her adobe studio outside Cuba. She was sixty-two. The new work was related to the pre-1967 grids but was different in important ways: the colour was no longer just a pale ground but had become the primary visual event of the paintings; the grids were less prominent, sometimes replaced by horizontal bands of pale wash; the formats had widened slightly. The first new paintings were shown at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1975. The reception was strong but cautious; many critics needed to be reminded who Martin was, after the seven-year absence. By the late 1970s, her reputation had been re-established. Taos In 1992, after eighteen years in the Cuba house, Martin moved to Taos, the small town in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. She was eighty. She bought a small modern studio building near the centre of town and an adjacent house. She painted there nearly every day until her death. The Taos years produced her most concentrated late work. The paintings were now slightly smaller (often 1.5 metres square), with horizontal bands of pale colour washed across the canvas: pinks, blues, yellows, and greys. The grids were sometimes invisible, the colour bands carrying the painting on their own. Each painting was titled with a single word: Friendship, Innocent Love, Untroubled Mind, Lovely Life. The titles read as instructions to the viewer about what the painting was offering. Martin had become explicit, in her late writing and her late conversations, about her view that the paintings were vehicles for specific emotional states. "The paintings are not landscapes," she said in a 1989 interview. "They are about what life feels like when it is at its best." The Influence By the 1990s, Martin had become a foundational figure for a younger generation of painters who were working in pared-down, attentive, contemplative modes. Painters as different as Sean Scully, Susan Rothenberg, Brice Marden, and Vija Celmins all named her as an important precedent. The Tate Modern's 2015 retrospective in London, which travelled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, made her standing as one of the central American painters of the second half of the twentieth century explicit. The reception was not universal. Some critics found the late work too repetitive. Others found the late writing's invocation of "joy" and "innocent love" too earnest. The work was also accused of being apolitical in a period when much of the most-discussed American art was explicitly political. The defence of the work has usually rested on the structure rather than the content. Martin had developed, over forty years of painting after 1957, a way of using a small set of formal devices (grid, band, pale colour, soft graphite) to produce paintings that operated on the viewer at a specific physiological frequency. The paintings work, when they work, because of how the eye reads them at close range. The End Martin died on 16 December 2004, aged ninety-two, in Taos. She had continued to paint until shortly before her death. The last canvases (now mostly in private collections) are smaller than the standard 1.5-metre square, and the bands of colour are even more reduced. The Harwood Museum in Taos has a permanent room of seven late Agnes Martin paintings. The Dia Beacon, in upstate New York, has a permanent installation of the major mid-period paintings. The Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art each hold significant individual works. The Agnes Martin Foundation, established in her will, manages her archive and the disposition of her remaining works. What the Departure Was For The seven-year break from painting between 1967 and 1974 has come to look, in retrospect, like the most important decision of Martin's career. She had been a successful New York painter; she could have continued and done well. By leaving, she let her work reset. By returning at sixty-two, she gave herself another thirty years of working at the highest level she ever reached. Martin painted for forty-seven years total. Almost all the work that matters most was made after she was sixty. The pre-1967 grids are foundational, but the post-1974 paintings (the Cuba paintings, the Taos paintings, the late horizontal bands) are what most viewers now think of when they think of an Agnes Martin painting. She had decided, in 1967, that what she had to say required her to stop talking first. The decision was unusual. It produced, in the end, the strongest second act in twentieth-century American painting.
Lempicka Painted the Aristocracy She Married Into, Then Outran Them All
Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1898 (the exact year is disputed; Lempicka herself gave several different dates across her life). Her family was wealthy bourgeois Polish-Jewish, with roots in both Warsaw and St Petersburg. She married a Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki, in St Petersburg in 1916. The Bolshevik Revolution caught them there in October 1917. Tadeusz was arrested by the Cheka in early 1918. Tamara secured his release by sleeping with a Swedish consul who had connections to the Bolshevik authorities. The couple escaped to Copenhagen, then to London, then to Paris by spring 1918. They were among the early waves of White Russian émigrés who would reshape Paris society in the 1920s. Paris By 1920 the Lempickis were broke. Tamara had brought no money from Russia, and Tadeusz could not find legal work in Paris. She had no professional training. She decided to support the family by painting. She enrolled briefly at the Académie Ranson and studied with Maurice Denis, then transferred to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1922 and studied with André Lhote. Lhote, who was teaching a kind of decorative Cubism, taught her the structural method that would underlie all her mature work: bodies built from geometric forms, sharply outlined, modelled with strong directional light. She would credit Lhote, throughout her life, as the only teacher who had taught her anything she could use. By 1923 she was exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne. Her first major sale (a portrait of Ira Perrot, a society neighbour) was in 1924. By 1925 she was painting the people who could afford to commission her: Polish émigré aristocrats, French industrialists, occasional foreign nobles passing through Paris. Her prices rose quickly through the late 1920s. She was one of the highest-paid female portraitists of the decade. The Style The Lempicka manner combined several sources that should not have fit together. From Lhote: the structural Cubism, the simplification of bodies into faceted geometric forms. From Italian Mannerism (which she had studied during a year-long visit to Italy in 1926): the elongated necks, the long fingers, the slightly artificial proportions, the heavy modelling of single figures against backgrounds reduced to architecture or sky. From Art Deco design (which was reaching its peak in Paris during her formative years): the highly polished surfaces, the bold colour blocking, the sense that the painted figure was a designed object. The combination was hers alone. Other artists had used pieces of it (Lhote himself was working a Cubist idiom; Italian Novecento painters were quoting Mannerism), but no one else produced the specific Lempicka effect: a portrait that looked like a piece of Art Deco metalwork, with the sitter cast in some unbreakable polished material. The Bugatti The 1929 self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti is the painting that defined her public image. It shows her at the wheel of a green sports car, wearing a leather helmet and grey gloves, the background a vertical strip of grey sky and skyscrapers. She did not actually own a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault. The picture was commissioned by Die Dame, a German fashion magazine, for a cover image. The Bugatti was an invention to suit the magazine. The painting became Lempicka's icon. It captures, in a single image, what she sold to her clients: a woman in control of speed, of modernity, of self-presentation, painted in the same hard-edged style that defined the architecture of the period. The cover was published in July 1929, three months before the Wall Street crash. The Marriage The Lempicki marriage did not survive Paris success. Tadeusz had never recovered psychologically from the Russian imprisonment and the loss of his Polish legal career. He drank heavily. Tamara had affairs throughout the 1920s, including with the German-Austrian Baron Raoul Kuffner, who was one of her major patrons. The couple divorced in 1928. Tamara took their daughter Kizette and continued painting. Tadeusz returned to Poland and died there in 1939, shortly before the German invasion. Tamara married Baron Kuffner in 1934 and became Baroness Kuffner. The marriage was financially comfortable and largely affectionate; Kuffner died in 1962 and Tamara never remarried. The 1930s The Depression hit her commercial practice hard. The wealthy clients who had been commissioning portraits in 1929 had less money in 1932. Lempicka adjusted by lowering her prices, taking smaller commissions, and (for the first time) painting non-commissioned subjects: female nudes, still lifes, religious scenes. By the late 1930s, she had moved to a more sober palette, less polished surfaces, and more conventional compositions. The change has been read as a response to the rise of Socialist Realism in Europe, but it was probably just a market adjustment. The hard-edged Art Deco manner had gone out of fashion. The portrait clients who remained wanted softer, more flattering work. The Lempickis left Paris in 1939, as Europe slid toward war. The Baron's properties in Hungary had been seized by the Hungarian government in 1939, and the family had to abandon them. They sailed to New York in early 1940 and then to Hollywood, where they bought a small house. Lempicka tried to establish a portrait practice in Los Angeles. The American market for European Art Deco portraiture was small and provincial. The practice did not really work. The Long Decline Lempicka spent the next two decades attempting to relaunch her career, with limited success. She had exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and (occasionally) Paris through the 1940s and 1950s, but the reception was tepid. The Art Deco style she had defined twenty years earlier had become deeply unfashionable. The art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and Lempicka's polished figurative work was treated as a relic. She continued painting. The work from the 1950s and 1960s is mostly small still lifes, portraits of friends, and occasional religious subjects (she had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1934). The technique was still excellent. The subjects were diminished. She was painting what she could find to paint rather than what she had once chosen. Cuernavaca In 1974, Tamara left Houston (where she had been living with Kizette and Kizette's husband) and moved to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She had been there several times on holiday and decided she preferred the climate. She bought a house called Tres Bambúes and lived there until her death. The last years were quiet. She painted little. She was visited by Kizette and by a few friends. She continued to receive small commissions from local Mexican families. Her international reputation was at its lowest point since the 1920s. She died on 18 March 1980, aged eighty-one or eighty-two. Her ashes were scattered over the crater of the Popocatépetl volcano, according to her wishes. The Recovery The reappraisal began in the late 1970s, even before her death. The Centre Pompidou's 1972 exhibition Les Années 25 (a celebration of the 1925 Paris Exposition that had given Art Deco its name) had included several Lempicka portraits and reintroduced her to French audiences. The 1980 Lucie Smith retrospective in Paris, shortly after her death, made her standing as the central Art Deco portraitist of the 1920s explicit. By the 1990s, her prices were rising sharply at auction. The Green Bugatti self-portrait sold at Sotheby's in 2009 for $6.1 million. The 1929 portrait of Marjorie Ferry sold for $20.5 million in 2020. Madonna had become an early major Lempicka collector in the 1980s. Other celebrities (Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand) followed. The painter who had been famous in 1929, forgotten in 1959, and dead in obscurity in 1980 became, by 2010, the most commercially successful female Art Deco artist on the market. The aristocracy she had painted in the 1920s had been displaced by the global financial elite. The new clients still wanted what her old clients had wanted: a portrait that looked like a piece of polished, unbreakable design.