Japan de luxe

With the exhibition Japan de luxe, the Museum Rietberg is dedicating itself to the surimono, the special form of Japanese woodblock prints that emerged in the late 18th to mid-19th century.

However, these woodblock prints are anything but just "printed things", as surimono literally translates. Artfully designed and elaborately printed on high-quality, unglued hōsho paper, each sheet is a complete work of art.

Printed in small editions of 50 to 500 copies, they were created as exclusive commissioned works in the urban bourgeois milieu. They were often status symbols for a select circle and can be seen as a reflection of society at the time.

Seasonal celebrations, private or professional changes and special cultural events provided opportunities for the production of these luxurious greeting cards. Givers and recipients enjoyed not only the exquisite design, but also the numerous literary and cultural allusions hidden in the poems and pictorial motifs.

The exhibition shows over 100 sheets, mainly donated by Gisela Müller and Erich Gross, which are on public display for the first time. It invites visitors to discover the elegance, poetry and hidden messages of the Surimono.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.