Art of the Japanese Postcard: Masterpieces from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection

Rating:
Summary: strong pictures, faulty words
Review: a gorgeous collection that would have been better served with some proper editing.

Beautiful art books like this must have elegant and nicely edited text to really shine among all the others. It's such a unique project that could have used a couple of more reviews before it went to press.

Rating:
Summary: minor league art form given major league treatment
Review: Score another home run for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for recognizing the importance of the Lauder collection of Japanese postcards and then producing a significant book to commemorate the 2004 exhbition of these miniature masterpieces. The MFA has again assembled a cast of formidable experts to provide both historical and artistic perspective for the late 19th- and early 20th-century postcards produced by many of Japan's leading artists. It is thus the case that the text chapters that open "Art of the Japanese Postcard: Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" help guide the reader through the changes in graphic art and design that followed Japan's opening to the West and the death of the classic "ukiyoe"-style woodblock art.

The postcards themselves are stunning, meriting repeated voyages through this beautifully designed and printed volume. And there are numerous other reasons to savor the images. For example, the cards that appear as numbers 9 through 60 in the catalogue/book all reflect Japan's contemporaneous take on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. Then there are chapters that demonstrate the impact of the West's Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements on Japanese art sensibilities. Three other cards, my favorites, illustrate famous "haiku" poems, with the artist, Saito Shoshu, using the themes of the cards to stylize the calligraphy with which the poems are rendered. Delight here in a snail's slime trail blended into calligraphic brushwork, an underwater scene in which the calligraphy takes on a very fluid style, and a poem broken up to refelct the hopping of a frog.






Rating:
Summary: Companion essays delineate the history of this art form
Review: The collaborative project of Anne Nishimura Morse, J. Thomas Rimer, and Kendall H. Brown, Art Of The Japanese Postcard is a gorgeous, full-color gallery of Japanese postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Far more than casual items to mail, most of these cards were designed by prominent artists and feature striking use of color and imagery. A few companion essays delineate the history of this unique art form as well as the immortalization of heart-stirring pictures meant to be sent and shared. Art Of The Japanese Postcard is an impressive and seminal work which is particularly recommended to students of Japanese Popular Culture.