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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Alongside being adept in the art of war, the samurai became conversant with the refined arts of painting, poetry, music performance, theatre and tea ceremonies

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Sexually Explicit Japanese Art





Produced from 1600 to 1900 and banned in Japan for much of the 20th century, these explicit and beautifully detailed erotic paintings, prints and books inspired Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley, Rodin and Picasso.
Mostly created by the artists of the ukiyo-e or ‘floating world’ school, these popular works were known as shunga, - literally  ‘spring pictures’. They appealed to all classes in Japan for almost 300 years, and to men and women alike. Frequently tender and humorous, they celebrate sexual pleasure in all its forms in brilliantly coloured paintings and prints, culminating with beautiful and explicit works by iconic artists Utamaro, Hokusai and Kunisada.
Within Japan, shunga has continued to influence modern forms of art, including manga, anime and Japanese tattoo art. The exhibition sheds new light on this unique art form within Japanese social and cultural history.


Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750), Sexual dalliance between man and geisha, c. 1711-16, hand-coloured woodblock print,. 1985,1022,0.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum.




Hosoda Eishi (1756–1829) Contest of Passion in the Four Seasons (Shiki kyo-en zu), late 1790s–early 1800s; one of a set of four hanging scrolls; ink, colour and gold on silk, Michael Fornitz collection.



Chobunsai Eishi (1756–1829); Young woman dreaming of Ise Monogatari; c. early nineteenth century. Hanging scroll; ink, colour and gold on silk © The Trustees of the British Museum.



Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), detail from Three comic shunga paintings. Japan, c. 1871–1889. Hanging scrolls, ink and colour on paper. Israel Goldman collection.



Kitagawa Utamaro; Lovers in the upstairs room of a teahouse, from Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow); c. 1788. Sheet from a colour-woodblock printed album © The Trustees of the British Museum.



Sugimura Jihei, Untitled erotic picture, mid-1680s, Private collection, USA




Attributed to Sumiyoshi Gukei (artist, 1631–1705) and Takenouchi Koretsune (calligrapher, 1640–1704) Series title: Tale of the Brushwood Fence, 17th century; handscroll, ink, colours, gold on paper, Michael Fornitz collection.



Kitagawa Utamaro, ‘Fancy-free type’ (Uwaki no so), from the series Ten Types in the Physiognomic Study of Women (Fujin sogaku juttai), c. 1792-3, colour woodblock print with white mica ground © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Kitagawa Utamaro; Mare ni au koi 稀ニ逢恋 (Love that Rarely Meets); Colour woodblock print; c. 1793-1794 © The Trustees of the British Museum.



Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Diving woman and octopi, page from Kinoe no komatsu (Pine Seedlings on the First Rat Day, or Old True Sophisticates of the Club of Delightful Skills) ,1814, illustrated book, colour woodblock © Michael Fornitz collection, Denmark.

Torii Kiyonaga; Series title: Sode no maki (Handscroll for the Sleeve) Woodblock print; Lovers with roll of tissue; c. 1785 © The Trustees of the British Museum.




Shunga Erotic Art in the Tokugawa Era>>>

Shunga: Japanese Erotic Art>>>

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