Background and Philosophy
Some 200 years ago in feudal Japan, in the city then called Edo (and now called Tokyo), there lived a painter by the name Kitagawa Utamaro (喜多川 歌麿). The chief theme of Utamaro's woodblock (浮世絵) prints was the denizens of the Yoshiwara, the vast pleasure quarter which existed to service the appetites of the samurai who were summoned to Edo from all across Japan to wait upon the Shogun. Utamaro's subjects were in the main the courtesans of the Yoshiwara, the great beauties able to summon prices high enough to ruin all but the greatest feudal lords, and the chief audience for the prints he made were the ordinary townsmen and lesser samurai for whom Utamaro's prints were about as close as they would ever get to these storied beauties.
Given Utamaro's subject matter and target audience, conventional wisdom about the relationship between art and commerce would indicate that the artist's work would be doomed to a rapid and lasting obscurity, as it is often supposed nowadays that nothing worthwhile can ever come of any artistic endevour engaged in with commerce in mind, but the reality of Utamaro's legacy lays such assumptions to waste: far from being rapidly forgotten, Utamaro's fame spread worldwide within decades of his passing, and today the beauty, sensitivity and vitality of the women whom the artist portrayed more widely than it ever has been, in large part precisely because of the commercial motivations which informed the creation of the prints.
Ours is a very different time and place from that in which Utamaro created his marvellous prints, but we believe that the same philosophy which informed the Japanese artist's continues to have relevance in our day: rather than regarding commercial imperatives as inimical to artistic creativity, we believe that they can indeed be a stimulus to it, and that the marketplace imposes a discipline which can be fruitful in reining in artistic self-indulgence.