Worthy Trip ‘East Meets West’ Focuses on Tokaido Series of 55 Woodblock Prints by Gary Tischler Japan haunts the West. In particular, Japan haunts America, for all the reasons that history provides and that the imagination and art fill in. This vital relationship is at once exaggerated and intimate. In Western popular culture, notions of Japan and what it means to be Japanese are never far away. The theme of East meets West is like a pulsating tale told on a canvas or scroll, from “The Tale of Genji” to “Shogun” to “Madame Butterfly” to the contemporary pop culture world of photography, fashion, video games, horror films and violent comics. In the art world, the work of Japanese master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige, who died in the middle of the 19th century when the East was just beginning to engage with the West, occupies an important position in this U.S.-Japanese relationship. The exhibition “East Meets West: Hiroshige at The Phillips Collection,” focuses on Hiroshige’s “The Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido” series, a set of 55 woodblock prints that were his first depicting the Tokaido Road—the fabled highway linking present-day Tokyo with the imperial city of Kyoto—which skyrocketed him to fame in his native Japan. The T okaido series seems to have its tendrils securely tied to the past, and yet, the more you look at it, the more vital and modern it seems, not static or formal. Exquisite is a word that comes up a lot in Hiroshige’s scenes, yet because of his unusual points of view, the scenes are far too full of humanity to be quite so formalized as the word exquisite might suggest. But the scenes also suggest a familiarity. They’re one way of seeing Japanese life in its pre-Western history of samurais, geishas and travelers on the road. What we have at the Phillips is the complete Tokaido Road landscape series, hugely popular prints from Hiroshige’s woodblocks. All by themselves, the prints provide a lively journey full of voices and compelling landscape vistas. This being a Phillips Collection exhibition, there is also a tidy connection to Duncan Phillips, the museum’s founder, who went to Japan in 1910 while still an undergraduate student and bought several of Hiroshige’s prints. Phillips was said to have been profoundly impressed by the printmaker’s moving winter and rain scenes. “[Hiroshige] … dared to attempt suggesting all sorts of weather,” Phillips wrote about the landscapes, “the downpours of summer rain, the fairyland of winter snowflakes, the stiff wind that bends the tree-tops and baffles the progress of pedestrians, the tranquil afterglow on the horizon, the witchery of moonlight.” Phillips saw how Japanese art in general and Hiroshige in particular influenced Western art, from the works of James McNeill Whistler to Maurice Prendergast to Pierre Bonnard. As a result, what you have at the Phillips now is really two exhibitions. Planted like another set of road signs on Hiroshige’s fabulous Tokaido Road trip are variations on his style and content by Western artists to complement his original prints. Although this may be a little distracting, it does offer the opportunity to view wonderful works by Milton Avery and Bonnard, along with the lesser-known Ernest Lawson’s paintings of Manhattan and Albert Pinkham Ryder’s wonderfully atmospheric “Moonlit Cove.” All of the Western works are suggestive of Japanese and Hiroshige’s influence, not to mention Phillips’s own excited infatuation with Japanese art. The effect is a little disconcerting, however. Although it’s a treat to run into such excellent works and pursue the thread being offered, it also has the effect of interrupting what is really the main exhibition. The Western paintings are like odd and wonderful fruit stands from another land on the Tokaido Road. They’re about art and ideas about art, but they’re not the main event. The journey is what’s important here. Hiroshige saw and experienced everything and never blinked. He went on the journey himself and captured different perspectives of what he saw—aerial views, scenery in the forefront, people coming into view in cinematic style. “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” is at once very traditional in its lines yet full of kinetic energetic. The series bubbles above all with life, as well as with the great beauty of capturing snow, rain, dusk, sunset, light and mountains. It’s like a movie of a road and people who have long since disappeared. Here, you’ll see great lords starting out in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) with a retinue of 20,000 or so of their closest friends and retainers. You’ll see advertising signs of inns naming the people staying there; you get women hustling the wares of an inn, including themselves; you get sumo wrestlers and peasant farmers, families, flute players, old men and children as they make the trip to the ancient capital of Kyoto over bridges with expansive mountains in the distance. There are horse shows, river crossings, the rain falling down, ferryboats and nature at its most splendid. Hiroshige did wonders with the landscapes and even more with the people in them. He brings the Tokaido Road and everything and everyone on it to bustling life. It’s worth the trip. “East Meets West: Hiroshige at The Phillips Collection” runs through Sept. 4 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., NW. For more information, please call (202) 387-2151 or visit www.phillipscollection.org. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.