NEW LONDON, CONN.- Noh Theatre in the Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Kōgyo (1869 – 1927) explores the art of woodblock prints and the history, stories, and costumes of Japanese Noh Theatre at the turn of the 20th century. This special exhibition brings to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum over 50 Japanese color woodblock prints and features several Japanese Noh masks from the museum’s own collection. The exhibition is on view through October 14, 2018.

Organized by independent curators Annemarie Sawkins, PhD and Martha Chaiklin, PhD, this traveling exhibition features prints from the private collection of Professors Richard J. and Mae J. Smethurst of the University of Pittsburgh, who have spent much of their academic careers teaching and writing about the classical theatre and history of Japan.

Noh is a Japanese performing art based on traditional court dances known as Bugaku, originally from China. It draws its material from many sources and its form from ritual and folk dances. The compelling power and beauty of Noh has influenced musicians, dramatists, and poets as diverse as Bertholt Brecht, Eugene O’Neill, Paul Claudel, William Butler Yeats, Benjamin Britten, and Ezra Pound, and has been recognized as a UNESCO World Theater form.

Artist Tsukioka Kōgyo (1869–1927) came of age in the Meji era (1868–1912), a period of modernization when Japan was opened to world trade after more than two hundred years of relative isolation. Kōgyo specialized in depictions of Noh, which until then had primarily been enjoyed by social elites. This changed at the end of the 19th century, however, when Noh theatre expanded in popularity and was embraced by the middle class. Tsukioka Kōgyo is the preeminent graphic artist of the Noh and Kyōgen theatres. For more than a third of a century--from the early-1890s until his premature death in 1927— Kōgyo created hundreds of paintings, prints, magazine illustrations, and postcard pictures of Noh and Kyōgen plays, as well as paintings and prints of flowers, birds, and genre and wartime scenes. Kōgyo’s numerous paintings were translated into series of woodblock prints, including Pictures of Noh (1897– 1902), One Hundred Noh Dramas (1922–1926), and Encyclopedia of Noh plays (1925–1930).