Edo City: Crucible of Culture lecture seriesWednesday 24, 31 March & 7 April 2010
6–7pm
Centenary Auditorium, lower level 1 Japan's city of Edo was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shoguns from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It grew to be one of the largest cities in the world and the centre for a vibrant urban culture. In this three-lecture series in conjunction with the exhibition Hymn to beauty: the art of Utamaro Professor William H Coaldrake introduces the high culture of the samurai, the popular culture of the townspeople and the influence of 19th-century Japan on the West. Professor Coaldrake was born in Tokyo, in Tsukiji, the heartland of Old Edo, the son of Australian missionary parents. He has spent his life coming and going from the city of his birth. He received his doctorate and taught at Harvard University before becoming Foundation Professor of Japanese at the University of Melbourne, where he is now Professorial Fellow. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Tokyo and at Oxford, and Reischauer Visiting Professor of Japanese Studies at Harvard in 2005-06. He is the author of two major books on Japanese architecture (The way of the carpenter: tools and Japanese architecture and Architecture and authority in Japan) and is currently completing a third book on the arts of Japan from the dawn of antiquity to the present day for Phaidon Press in the UK. Lecture 1
24 March 2010
Edo high culture: shogunal and samurai palaces
The city of Edo, forerunner to modern Tokyo, was created by the Tokugawa shogunate as a metaphor of authority and as a mechanism of control over the regional lords or daimyo. The shogun’s castle and the palaces of the daimyo were the settings for the conduct of government and elaborate rituals. These were held in great audience chambers decorated with golden screen paintings and spectacular polychrome sculpture of mythological beasts and birds of paradise. But great ambitions led to even greater disasters and much of this city was consumed by fire in 1657. Lecture 2
31 March 2010
Edo popular culture: mass consumption and ukiyo-e prints
In the city rebuilt after the 1657 fire, the surviving symbols of shogunal and samurai high culture were wilfully appropriated by the townspeople. Elite architecture was parodied and high culture conventions in painting and materials popularised in the ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world’. Woodblock prints became the art of mass consumption, depicting the daily life of the artisans and merchants and the women of the entertainment district. Lecture 3
7 April 2010
Edo in the West: icon of exoticism, forerunner of modernity
The art of Edo transcended the time and place of its creation to take the Western world by storm in the later 19th century, from Impressionist artists like Claude Monet and the glass sculptor Emile Gallé, to the broader public of Europe, America and Australia, who flocked to the great exhibitions at Paris and London, Philadelphia and Chicago, and Sydney and Melbourne. The particular aesthetic characteristics of Edo art challenged long-established Western conventions in pictorial representation and the use of colour, opening the way to abstraction and to modernism. Join us for drinks in the Modern Australian galleries on the ground level after each lecture. Hide extra info ↑ Single lecture: $30 members, $40 non-members Bookings > | 
