The arts of the Edo period are among the most well-known and celebrated works in the history of Japanese art. They have been extensively studied in both Japanese and English, but several recent books have begun opening new vistas for scholars and others interested in this fascinating period. It is timely, then, that Timon Screech's 2012 text Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan has recently been reissued in paperback. Screech's book, along with Julie Nelson Davis's Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market and Morgan Pitelka's Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability, demonstrates the vibrancy of current scholarship in the field. Taken together, these three books challenge assumptions about how works of art are made, collected, and displayed. They suggest that works of art are not just made by culture but themselves make culture. All three scholars reveal a deep interest in what works of art can say to us when we look beyond subject matter and style.

Screech's text is a welcome overview of the materiality of Japanese art from the Edo period. This broad, sweeping book is not quite a beginner's text because it assumes some background knowledge and a deep interest, but Screech engages an impressive range of subjects and ideas, offering a useful consolidation of general knowledge. This magisterial work from a scholar with an already impressive publication history should be required reading for all Japanese art history graduate students and any young scholar with an interest in the Edo period. The bibliography would make an outstanding list for a PhD student's comprehensive exam. In some ways, Obtaining Images follows upon Quitman Phillips's 2000 text The Practices of Painting in Japan, 1475–1500 (Stanford University Press) as a work that treats artistic production and networks, rather than the resulting works of art themselves, as the objects of study.

In his introduction, Screech lays out the parameters of his project, one of which is to focus largely, but not always exclusively, on painting and prints. He is interested in the “extra-visual aspects” of works of art (p. 7). His emphasis on the “obtaining” of images, seen in the title and reiterated in the introduction, is intended to focus on paintings and prints as physical objects arising in a social context. He means not only how collectors obtained images, but also how images were “obtained” in the understanding of being customary or acceptable (p. 7). In short, Screech's project approaches works of art as commodities that are produced and initially consumed in a specific social context.

Julie Nelson Davis's book Partners in Print thematically continues her earlier work on Utamaro as a public figure and the creation of the publishing industry.Footnote ¹ The current study is among those that signal a broader shift in ukiyo-e studies, situating research in the wider context of production beyond only the action of the artist as designer. Her 2008 chapter on Tsutaya Jūzaburō in Julia Meech and Jane Oliver's Designed for Pleasure catalog was an important work in this path.Footnote ² The current text offers four case studies of ukiyo-e works. Davis frames ukiyo-e production as a collaboration—between multiple artists, between artists and publishers, and between artists and authors. This study helps highlight the multiplicity of ukiyo-e production—both elite and popular—within a large cultural network. Collaboration can also encompass unequal contributions and the action of the consumer in creating the meaning of a work of art (p. 2).

Morgan Pitelka is a historian, not an art historian, although his specialization in material culture and early work on the tea ritual has brought him into the larger art history world, and he regularly participates on conference panels and at symposia with art historians. His perspective as a historian allows him to incorporate materials that an art historian might be hesitant to include, such as severed heads and raptors. He makes an excellent case for treating these like tea ritual vessels, as instances of the material culture of power. Pitelka convincingly argues that the accumulation and use of material culture was not just a sideline to wealth and warrior power but actually an integral part of creating that power. The idea of “samurai sociability,” expressed in his subtitle, captures the way objects and their circulation helped to build and reinforce asymmetrical power relationships necessary to Ieyasu's consolidation of power. This is a compelling argument for the deep relevance of art historical studies to understand social and political movements beyond only the production of art.

Screech's Obtaining Images is a master class in thought-provoking ideas about early modern visual images. Part one addresses this context very carefully. The thematic chapters establish a rich structure for contemplating works of Japanese art across traditional lines of format, style, and subject. This section lays out the big themes of his argument and prepares readers to consider the survey of styles and genres addressed in part two. These four chapters together present a flexible framework of Edo-period artistic production that encourages readers to challenge received narratives about artistic categorization.

Chapter 1 focuses upon popular myths of famous artists and their works. Screech uses such legends to delineate the Platonic ideal of the artist and how it reflects an underlying belief that a well-crafted work of art could become a living thing, even if that does not happen in the present moment of a particular individual.

Chapter 2 investigates auspicious images. In Screech's hands, this is more than just a common type of subject; it is a reason to produce images in the first place. Auspicious images were appropriate in a variety of contexts, from the interior of Nijō Castle in Kyoto (the Tokugawa shogunate's official residence in the imperial capital) to woodblock prints.

Chapter 3 focuses most closely on the market for images. Screech discusses formats, costs, and ways of collecting. His position is that the idea of an image and its physical nature are inextricably linked: to understand one, the other must also be considered.

Closing out part one in chapter 4, Screech addresses Buddhist art; this is the only section of the book that includes an extensive discussion of sculpture and three-dimensional objects. In keeping with his aim to challenge traditional categorization, he resists excluding Shinto works from Buddhist production, arguing that the two religions were deeply intertwined during the Edo period and that separating them is anachronistic. He demonstrates the diversity of images that could be considered under the rubric of “religious art” and some that mingle with secular art.

Part two builds upon the ideas of the first part, frequently referring back to them, with examples that offer an organized overview of the types of paintings and prints produced during the Edo period. It is rich with case studies and examples that demonstrate the application of Screech's larger theoretical ideas of creating a multifaceted, interdependent view of Edo-period image production.

In chapter 5, which looks at the Kano school, Screech argues that the defining features of Kano style are their tradition and the integration of their painting into the shogunate's expression of power. As the central Tokugawa authority weakened in the late Edo period, so too did the creativity of the Kano school.

Screech turns his attention to portraiture in chapter 6. Edo specialists may initially be surprised by this, as portraits are not typically considered an important genre of Edo-period art. Again, Screech challenges standard assumptions by skillfully demonstrating that the genre exists, even outside of ukiyo-e production, especially when portraits of historical figures are included.

Screech titled chapter 7 “Japanese Painting” and immediately acknowledges the oddness of suggesting a focus on that subject in a book seemingly devoted to it. His treatment is much richer than the division between “waga” (Japanese pictures) and “kanga” (Chinese pictures) typically taught to new students of Japanese art history through exploring the idea of “Japanese painting” as a category in the Edo period related to images of Japan and specifically images of classical (Heian) Japan. Perhaps the category could also be viewed as a form of classicism, but its images are not necessary classical in style. Through the chapter's structure that traces the Tosa school and then Rinpa (Sōtatsu-Kōrin mode) from Kyoto to Edo, Screech shows a shift in focus across the Edo period from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo) and elite culture to popular culture.

The eighth chapter demonstrates why “Japanese painting” works as a category within the corpus of Japanese art by exploring new lineages of paintings by literati who conceptually linked themselves to the Asian mainland, as well as later so-called Eccentrics who stood outside lineages and schools.

Chapter 9 concerns the “floating world” paintings and prints, arguably the most well-known images from the Edo period. Screech emphasizes that even this genre is not a monolith by referring throughout to the multiple floating worlds. These images, both painted and printed, documented leisure time in the shogun's capital. A great theme of this chapter is the idea of mixing; mixing themes from other genres into the floating worlds and the mixing of classes of people made visible through images of floating worlds. This also includes “refashioning,” his larger term for styles that include mitate, furyū, and other terms often unsatisfactorily translated as “parody.” Screech's goal is to take floating world images back from their broad, modern popularity and return them more concretely to the social context of their original production.

Screech ends part two, and thus the book, with a study of Western influences on Japanese art despite the tightly controlled access to foreigners during the Edo period. He posits that Western influence remained a novelty to depict recognizably Japanese subjects in a new way, such as Shiba Kōkan's Birds in a Winter Landscape (late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries) as an example of the theme Cold Birds on a Withered Tree. Screech ends the study with Shiba Kōkan's disillusionment with Western tropes recorded in 1813 and emphatically disassociates Western influence in art from Japan's opening to foreign interchange in 1854.

By structuring the book with two sections, Screech is able to first give the reader themes and theoretical frameworks in part one to which he returns in part two. Readers who read cover to cover will likely find themselves moving back and forth across the book because ideas resonate in multiple places and images are referenced in subsequent chapters. Screech himself regularly uses footnotes to refer readers to discussions elsewhere in the book. This is tremendously helpful because it also makes individual chapters accessible to the reader who only wants to dip into selected topics. Throughout Obtaining Images, Screech's arguments and examples challenge traditional stereotypes about Japanese art and call for a more nuanced understanding of the artistic production of the Edo period.

Davis structures Partners in Print around four case studies that overlap in interesting ways. She points out in the introduction that the four do not form a unified group, but rather clusters of three that speak to each other differently as examples of collaborations and artistic production. Her outline of ukiyo-e in the introduction could serve as an excellent general overview of the subject as a stand-alone piece, despite the carefully interwoven references to her own project. Her examples of collaboration include more traditional interpretations of multiple artists working on the same piece and newer interpretations such as those that focus on the publisher/artist relationship. Several themes, such as patronage by haikai groups and the relationships between paintings and prints, appear throughout the volume in more than one example.

Davis's first chapter studies printed images by Kitagawa Utamaro's teacher, Toriyama Sekien. Her argument centers on the use of printed material to impart knowledge of painting to wider audiences. Sekien's printed painting manuals reproduced his painting style, rather than images styled as prints for wide distribution. Davis argues that this places them at the junction between elite styles such as the Kano school of Sekien's teacher and the popular ukiyo-e production of Sekien's own students like Utamaro. Sekien's willingness to publish Kano painting styles (and others) in an easily circulated woodblock-printed book helped to create the genre of ukiyo-e in the decades immediately following the creation of full-color nishiki-e brocade prints around 1765. Sekien's gravitas lent legitimacy to Utamaro's and other artists’ focus on the contemporary human figure in the floating world.

The second chapter provides a careful reading of The Mirror of Yoshiwara Beauties, Compared (Seirō Bijin Awase Sugata Kagami) from 1776. This volume is a collaboration in multiple ways: two publishers and two artists are credited with the production. Davis argues that even with a close visual analysis of the images, it is sometimes nearly impossible to determine which images were made by Kitao Shigemasa and which by Katsukawa Shunshō. Possibly the artists modified their styles towards greater unity for this project, but Davis's intriguing suggestion is that the block carver could be credited with bringing the artists’ individual styles into a closer resemblance. Davis demonstrates that the partnership between the publishers Tsutaya Jūzaburō and Yamazaki Kinbei in producing this text helped Tsutaya expand his reach into Edo. That new reach, in turn, had profound effects on the ukiyo-e market. She also broadens the idea of collaboration within the Yoshiwara to include most of its participants—brothel owners, clients, print designers, and publishers—who helped create a fantasy world of pleasure and fashion.

The third chapter takes up a fascinating example of printmaking deploying the tropes of painting. Torii Kiyonaga and his publisher Nishimura Yohachi produced an unsigned work (but compellingly attributed to them) that took the standard vertical format of pillar prints and turned them horizontally to depict shunga scenes of couples having sex. This collaboration seems to have successfully circumvented censorship laws by remaining unsigned, but used such a recognizable style that Kiyonaga and Nishimura's involvement is clear. This example is the opposite of Sekien's paintings refashioned to be prints; this is a set of prints intended to mimic painting.

The final case study takes up an object meant to be produced and consumed quickly—a comic book by Santō Kyōden with illustrations by Kitao Masayoshi from 1790 titled Greatest Sales Guaranteed: Quick-Dye Mind Study. Of all the examples Davis discusses, this would have been the most widely known during its time. The collaboration was a satire of religion and passed judgment on contemporary morals. Unlike the other case studies in Davis's book, this example offered social commentary to the reader through a life that in its broad outlines could resemble the consumer's own. This illustrated book provides Davis an opportunity to apply her ideas to an object that celebrates low culture over high culture and to assess the interaction between text and image to create meaning.

Davis does not leave the analysis of her case studies only in the realm of social context. She also offers careful visual analysis, such as her reading of The Mirror of Yoshiwara Beauties, Compared as an idealized walk through the Yoshiwara. She deftly demonstrates how the depiction of women within the book also signals their rank to a knowing viewer. Comparing women of different ranks in the Yoshiwara is an articulation of Davis's additional theme of evaluation and critique, which links all the case studies and is an important part of Davis's scholarly contribution in this text. She proposes a variety of ways printed images were evaluated by their Edo-period publics and ways they offer evaluation of the society that produced them.

Pitelka's Spectacular Accumulation looks at material culture through a different lens. He explores how objects are deployed to demonstrate and generate power. His interest is not in collecting per se but in how those collections were displayed and distributed by sixteenth-century warriors to navigate their power relationships. Pitelka's book is structured with a mix of theme and chronology that broadly moves through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the activities of the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage for Ieyasu's “spectacular accumulation” by exploring the practices of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. As expected based on Pitelka's previous work, tea ritual objects constitute one of his primary examples. However, his nuanced argument postulates that collecting objects articulates the same demonstration of power on the part of warlords as does their handling of people. Just as his larger argument suggests a form of agency for objects, these chapters argue that people were also part of a commodified exchange at the center of power articulation. Nobunaga was particularly interested in objects associated with the Ashikaga shoguns of the previous warrior government. Contact with those objects suggested his own contact with and assuming of Ashikaga power. Interestingly, one of the people commodified as a hostage was Ieyasu himself; he was raised away from his parents’ and grandfather's domain from the ages of three to seventeen as part of a hostage exchange to cement an alliance.

Chapter 3 proposes that sociability, most specifically in terms of gift-giving and trading objects of material culture, demonstrate Ieyasu's rise to power by maintaining asymmetrical relationships in warrior society. Among the gifts Ieyasu gave to establish and maintain political relationships were luxury objects now commonly found in museums and enfeoffments of land, which Pitelka treats as different articulations of the same ideas of sociability. Pitelka's discussion of the exchange with Hideyoshi's heir Hideyori in 1611 clearly illustrates both warriors using gifts to demonstrate power and Hideyori's refusal to treat Ieyasu as a superior (pp. 65–66).

Chapters 4 and 5 continue to extend Pitelka's thesis that material culture exchange was not just a symptom of but in fact created warrior power. Ieyasu was not very interested in the tea ritual, but he was devoted to falconry. He gave and received raptors the same way Nobunaga and Hideyoshi traded tea ritual implements. After the battles of Sekigahara and Osaka Castle, which are described in detail, Ieyasu collected swords and severed enemy heads, and he had the wreckage of Osaka Castle combed for surviving famous objects that could be reconstructed and thus reenter networks of power articulation. Pitelka sees all these actions as similar usages of material culture in warrior society.

The final chapter analyzes Ieyasu's deification and enshrining at Nikkō through a material culture lens. Objects given and collected at the shrine bind both the shrine and the donors to the memory of Ieyasu. Later Tokugawa descendants continually donated objects inherited from Ieyasu back to the shrine honoring him as part of articulating their own position in the power structure of the shogunate. Ieyasu's objects continue to shape his legacy.

The brief epilogue calls on viewers of these objects in modern museums to remember the grim history to which they belong. Swords are not just (or even mostly) beautiful works of art; they are violent weapons that reinforced warrior rule.

Pitelka provocatively argues that objects affect the people with whom they come in contact (agency) and invokes the idea of contingency from the Renaissance scholar Gene Brucker, who posits that unpredictable events that have built on previous events sometimes sway history. Pitelka effectively combines these two ideas to suggest that the agency of material culture plays an important role in the contingency of the early modern period. He convincingly argues that the accumulation and use of material culture was not just a sideline to wealth and warrior power but actually an integral part of creating that power. “Samurai sociability” was the network, expertly deployed by Ieyasu, through which material culture was given, traded, and coerced away from collections to create relationships of debt and obligation among warriors. One surprising conclusion of Pitelka's book is how little time Ieyasu actually spent in Edo as shogun. Pitelka's reading of diaries and other records suggests that of the five years he spent as shogun, leyasu only spent one year in Edo itself (p. 83). Pitelka persuasively demonstrates that this time away from Edo was necessary to pursue the accumulation and exchange of material objects to secure his power base and ensure the peaceful transfer of the shogunate to his oldest surviving son, Hidetada.

Although the Davis and Pitelka do not cite Obtaining Images, they are part of the same intellectual project to hold an awareness of the “thingness” of the work of art at the forefront of its study.Footnote ³ This is more specific than addressing the format and circulation of images or other objects of material and visual culture. It reminds us that works of art and manifestations of material culture are part of larger networks of disparate objects that in their original contexts might have resided among or been viewed next to a wide plethora of other objects from which they are now usually divorced. We do not think of Kano-style painting in conjunction with ukiyo-e images, but Davis's first chapter proves that we should do this more often. Pitelka's work challenges art historians to remember the related function of objects that are not works of art by most standard definitions but that coexist with works of art in material networks.Footnote ⁴ Edo-period Japan did not have museums in the modern sense to define what was art and what was not. The lived experience of warriors’ (in Pitelka's case) interaction with objects in their possession and orbit was much messier. Art historians such as Screech and Davis can help historians consider when conditions of production and aesthetic details do matter. Does the quality of the lacquer work on Nobunaga's enemies’ skulls matter? Very possibly.

Both Screech and Davis demonstrate a welcome shift in ukiyo-e studies towards acknowledging the horrors of the Yoshiwara and the unlicensed districts for the women who worked there. Screech refers to these women as “sex workers” rather than hiding their status behind the more euphonious “courtesan.” Davis also calls them “sex workers” but chooses to mainly refer to them using the untranslated “yujō” (women for play) that was the term used during the Edo period. She comments that the term “courtesan” suggests a connection to court life that is not accurate in this case (pp. 63–64). Both of their projects are improved by such a frank acknowledgement of the sex workers’ conditions. In keeping with Screech's goal to focus attention on the original context of ukiyo-e in the Edo period, general awareness of the difficulty the women faced emphasizes the romantic image of them constructed through ukiyo-e. For Davis's project, the public availability of information about these women helps increase our modern understanding of ways they were accessible as objects of evaluation and assessment. Sex workers of the Edo period were commodified and objectified through their portrayal in ukiyo-e prints. Pitelka's arguments about warriors exchanging people as objects resonates with the conditions of sex workers depicted in ukiyo-e prints more than a century and a half after Ieyasu's death. His approach could be extended further into the Edo period and applied beyond warrior society.

All three of these books help to pave the way for more research into Edo-period material culture. Screech's reevaluation of genre and tradition challenges further research to resist easy categorization and think about objects as fully realized parts of cultural networks. Davis vastly increases the nuanced lens through which we consider the relationships among the multiple parties involved in the production of any ukiyo-e work. Pitelka pushes at the boundaries of material culture and art, which encourages us all to think more broadly about the categories in which the objects of our studies can be situated. They are connected by a shared interest in the physical and conceptual idea of works of art as embodied things rather than just aesthetic images, which continues to bring history and art history together in many subfields. I eagerly await more projects that build on the models of understanding offered in these three books.