The Dawn of the Floating World

The carnivalesque urban culture of Japan's Edo period is captured in The Dawn of the Floating World 1650-1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the volume gathers many previously unpublished woodblock prints and paintings of pleasure quarters, actors, courtesans and streetscapes. The book is edited by Timothy Clark, a keeper in the British Museum's Japanese antiquities department; Dartmouth art history professor Allen Hockley; and Anne Nishimura Morse and Louise E. Virgin, curators of Japanese art at the MFA, Boston. Clark and Morse contribute essays on the development and collection of ukiyo-e art, respectively, and the book also includes biographies of the major artists of the period. (Apr.)