Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan

Here’s something I wish I’d caught when I was in New York recently: an exhibition of ehon, Japanese picture books at the New York Public Library that looks fabulous. Click on the title of this post to get to the NYPL’s description of the exhibit. Or click here to see a slide show and description at Slate.

Asian artists are so lucky. Their art tradition has always integrated drawing and writing and painting because their systems of writing are based on pictorial representations. In Western art, letters may have started out as representations of something — a yoked ox for an A, for instance — but for millennia those letters have represented sounds rather than pictures. So we are usually working to integrate two alphabets (capitals and minuscules) together with illustrations, and the mark-making for each of the elements is markedly (ha) different. The capitals are more a drawn letter form, the minuscules more a written/cursive form, and the illustrations are achieved by any number of methods.

Our medieval illuminated manuscripts solve this by placing the paintings in a window, setting them in a different plane of existence. It’s not nearly so satisfying as the Asian approach to book design. And this exhibit shows that clearly.

Thanks to members of the Book_Arts-L listserve who posted information about this exhibit.