“Too Soon?” (part 3 of 3)

On Shunga

Shunga, the painted or printed representations of sexual practices and activities, were produced between about 1600-1850 by ukiyo-e artists in Japan. If you are not interested in this topic, go read someone else; you have the choice to click away.

Early ukiyo-e artists specialized in making paintings, but creating prints made the work widely available. Without metallurgy or industrialization, the traditional form of reproduction (once paper was common) was woodblock printing. The main artists rarely carved their own woodblocks for printing; rather, production was divided between the artist, who designed the prints; the carver(s), who cut the woodblocks; the printer(s), who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto hand-made paper; and the publisher, who financed, promoted, and distributed the works. The prints were produced and sold either as single sheets or—more frequently—combined into book form.

Shunga books (“shunga” means “spring pictures,” a euphemism for sexual imagery) were popular and generally available. The exact historical context for the existence of these materials is not recorded, so it is difficult to understand completely from our modern perspective (and mores). However, there were repeated governmental attempts to suppress shunga, the first of which was issued in 1661 banning, among other things, erotic books (known as kōshokubon, literally “lewdness books”). While other genres, such as works criticizing samurai, were driven underground, shunga continued to be produced with little difficulty.

Colonization by and interaction with puritanical westerners during the nineteenth century put shunga into disfavor due to its explicitly erotic nature. In the mid-1800s, an American businessperson described shunga as “vile pictures executed in the best style Japanese art.” There are reports of Americans being “shocked and disgusted” when Japanese acquaintances and their wives showed off shunga at their homes. In the twentieth century, the historical shunga went further underground and became taboo.

As late as 1975, “no relevant material” existed in the British Museum when art historians would inquire. And even when pressed into being allowed access to it, researchers were told that it “could not possibly be exhibited to the public” and had not been catalogued. It was still too soon, at least by cultural standards. Recall that the fervor over Robert Maplethorpe only happens in the late 1980s.

In 1995, the British Museum staged the exhibition The Passionate Art of Utamaro, which included all of the great shunga works by that artist. And in 2013, the Museum presented a 170-item display, the first-ever dedicated to shunga – Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art.

Getting shunga on display in Japan is noteworthy and recent; from “Time Out – Tokyo” (December, 2015):

After much hand-wringing and controversy, the first-ever exhibition of traditional Japanese erotic art (shunga, literally ‘spring pictures’) in this country is finally happening. Spurred on by the success of a similar, critically acclaimed display at the British Museum in 2013, the organizers reportedly offered this exhibit to around ten museums, only to be turned down by them all – the ‘obscene’ reputation of shunga remains strong in some circles, despite the fact the art is readily available in e.g. book form across Japan. The exhibition was finally taken up by Mejirodai’s Eisei Bunko Museum, usually dedicated to the preservation and display of the Hosokawa samurai clan’s history and artistic fortune. From September on, visitors can rest their eyes on around 120 pieces, but you’ll need to be 18 or older to enter.

Edo Period Original Japanese handscroll shunga picture (c.1680)
by unknown
11.25 x 8.5 in, ink and color on silk, on a paper backing
Coppola Collection

17th Century shunga painting picture: crease marks because it was originally rolled up and part of a long scroll. Still has very nice and clearly visible gold and silver mica (metallic pigments). The ‘Chinese white’ colorant (gofun) used for the female is derived from ground oyster shell.

Image from: Ehon Hitachi obi
by Kitagawa Utamaro (ca 1753-1806)
Dated: Kansei era, 7th year 1795
10.67 x 8 in; woodblock print on paper
Coppola Collection

Shunga Image (source unknown)
by Keisai Eisen (1790-1848)
Est. date: Edo period, 1825
14.75 x 9.75 in.; woodblock print on paper
Coppola Collection

On anti-Semitic propaganda

If you are not interested in this topic, go read someone else; you have the choice to click away.

Although anti-Semitic propaganda pieces have been integrated into the exhibits at some of the Holocaust museums, the first-ever dedicated exhibit of 150 pieces of these materials was presented at the Caen-Normandie Museum, in France, titled “Heinous Cartoons 1886-1945: The anti-Semitic Corrosion of Europe,” during the latter half of 2017.

2017!

The materials for the exhibit came from one collector. Since the early 1960s, Auschwitz survivor Arthur Langerman has amassed a collection of 7000-8000 items in this genre, and could never attract the interest of anyone to dedicate a display. And yet, he has argued, these are a key piece of remembrance.

The materials and their messages are reprehensible. But how can ignoring this critical documentation of historical and widespread hatred be the right decision, particularly because the Holocaust was the culmination of generations of overt denigration – worldwide – and not the de novocause that the Nazi regime championed and took to the level of mass genocide? The answer to the question of how such prejudice could happen so quickly is quite clearly that it was not quick at all. The evidence for widespread and explicit mass market hatred goes back to the mid-1800s, and these are statements of widespread historical scapegoating… not a new invention. You could buy and send your friends overtly anti-Jewish postcards from your vacation trip to the boardwalk.

How can 2017 be too soon?

The conversation is intriguing. From a published article describing the Langerman exhibition:

Given the deplorable nature of their message, can any of these works really be called art? “Yes,” says Langerman. But Stéphane Grimaldi, the museum’s director general, disagrees. “These are historical documents,” he says, “they have no artistic value. They’re everything art isn’t.” He refused to put any paintings on display, preferring to focus instead on the graphic propaganda.”

There are two collectors who have probably amassed the largest collection of anti-Semitic propaganda in the US, one of whom is in Michigan and the other in Ohio. Their site is Germanpropaganda.org

A video documentary about Langerman and the development of the exhibit was produced (password ARTHUR).

https://vimeo.com/255065767

“Youpino” (page 3)
unattributed
published by NEF in Paris, ca. 1930-1944
8 x 6 inches, printed on paper
Coppola Collection

Stamp and sticker in rear show this was the property of the Union Populaires de la Jeunesse Francaise, a fascist youth movement.

Plus vieux, it trichait au jeu pour accroitre le nombre de ses jouets. Parce que c’était un Juif!

Older, he cheated on the game to increase the number of his toys. Because he was a Jew!

“Youpino” (page 7)
unattributed
published by NEF in Paris, ca. 1930-1944
8 x 6 inches, printed on paper
Coppola Collection

<Brulez ce blé, sinon les prix de vente vont baisser>
<Burn this wheat, otherwise the selling prices will go down. >

Marié, au lieu de gagner bon pain proprement, Youpino trafique, malhonnêtement pour s’enrichir rapidementParce que c’était un Juif!

Married, instead of winning good bread properly, Youpino trades, dishonestly to get rich quickly. Because he was a Jew!ˆ

“The American Jew”
by Telemachus Thomas Timayenis
1888 Minerva Press
Coppola Collection

America’s First Anti-Semitic Author

From: The National Herald, January 25, 2015:

No comprehensive history of the Greeks in the United States can be presented without the inclusion of this problematic individual. In short, Timayenis was a professor, novelist, playwright and one of the first to publish a discourse on what was then known as the Jewish Question along racial lines in the United States, rather than considerations of religious doctrine.

In 1886, Timayenis was the director of the New York School of Languages. By 1887, Timayenis was tutoring the children of some of America’s richest families including the Rockefellers.

In 1888, Timayenis left his academic work and established Minerva Publishing Company in New York, the first company in American to publish books critical of Jews. Timayenis anonymously authored three tracts on the Jews: The Original Mr. Jacobs: A Startling Exposé, ‎The American Jew: An Expose of His Career‎, and Judas Iscariot: An Old Type in a New Form.

Initially, Timayenis based his accounts largely on the publications of Edouard Drumont, founder of the Anti-Semitic league in France. Various authors adamantly contend that Timayenis’ work spread a permeating ideological fog over the 1880s such that Anti-Semitism gained new ground across the United States.

From the Introduction to “The American Jew”:

We expect that the Jews will try to boycott “The American Jew,” using the same peculiar tactics as in the case of “The Original Mr. Jacobs.” They will appoint committees to visit book-dealers, urging them not to handle the book; they will buy up and destroy all copies found exposed for sale; they will bribe, threaten, plead, and try in every possible way to interfere with its sale; they will circulate reports that the book has been “called in,” and will spread many other lies – lies that the Jew knows so well how to disseminate.

On Nanshoku

As with most ancient cultures, there is a history of men who have sex with men that dates back for millennia. If you are not interested in this topic, go read someone else; you have the choice to click away.

When one talks about the way culture and media provide a social construction of ideas, it is important to recognize that even the term “homosexual” and its appended concept is strictly modern and derives from fairly puritanical European and American roots.

With the rise of shunga in the Edo period, depictions of male-male interactions were not in dedicated volumes, but mingled (albeit infrequently in an absolute sense) within the shunga volumes. One’s role as the dominant or submissive partner was a more critical identifier than one’s gender.

The male-male shunga, called nanshoku (male color, using a character for “color” that was associated with sexual pleasure), ran the representational gamut that one finds in the ancient cultures: the young-old, perhaps pederastic relations found in monasteries and the military, male prostitution among young actors, to nothing more than humorous situations and acrobatic sex acts.

In the last 20 years, as collections of shunga have become available, some authors have written about the occurrence of nanshoku within shunga, but there has never been a studied exhibit of this taboo within the taboo.

Perhaps it is simply too soon…

From “Sokuseki Joritsu” (in three books)
Images by Utagawa Kunisada (1785-1865)
Text author:Sanenaga
Size: 7 × 5 in, 18-22 pp each, woodblock print on paper
Date: Late 19th century
Coppola Collection

From “Makuro Bunko” (Pillow Collection).
Images by Keisai Eisen (1790-1848)
Size: 9.5 x 8 in., woodblock print on paper
Date: c.1823
Coppola Collection

From “Baibobo sensei injoho” (Mr Pussybuyer’s Erotic Treasures)
Images by Terasawa Masatsugu (?-1790)
Size” 8.67 x 10.67 in., woodblock print on paper
Date: c. 1760
Coppola Collection

“Too Soon?” (part 2)

More than just making jokes, there is an interesting “too soon?” question about when uncomfortable or discomforting history is represented in the dramatic, consumable media (TV, movies, museum exhibits).

On the 9/11 attacks:

On March 10, 2002, the first documentary about 9/11 was broadcast on television (In “9/11,” the filmmakers were in NY on September 11 as part of a documentary on a group of firefighters). An international film made up of 11-minute segments was released on September 11, 2002.

The national memorial site and museum were opened on September 11, 2011.

On the Holocaust:

The war documentary “Nazi Concentration Camps” was released in late November, 1945, portions of which were included in the 1961 epic “Judgment at Nuremberg.”

Judgment at Nuremberg (the film) had itself followed from the concise, stirring and rewarding production on television’s Playhouse 90 (April 16,1959).

Beginning in the 1960s, survivors outside of Europe and Israel also took steps to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust—the first of such institutions in the United States—was founded by a group of survivors who met in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) class in Hollywood in 1961. The museum’s first exhibit consisted of survivors’ own mementos, written records, and photographs.

In the 1970s and ’80s other museums were founded in El Paso, Texas; Farmington Hills, Michigan; San Francisco, California; and Buffalo, New York; as well as in Montreal, Canada; and Melbourne, Australia.

In the 1990s, at the approach of the 50-year anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, there was renewed interest in establishing institutions to memorialize, research, and educate. Around the world several more Holocaust museums were founded, including the Fundación Memoria del Holocausto (1993) in Buenos Aires, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993) in Washington, D.C., the Cape Town Holocaust Centre (1999) in South Africa, and the Holocaust Education Center (1995) in Fukuyama, Japan.

Later constructions include the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center (2002) and, near Chicago, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (2009).

On the Nazi art plunder:

As of 2017, there is an estimated $37B in art treasures still missing from the Nazi plunder of Europe during WW2, which does not count the art that current sits in museums and private collections around the world that was possessed, repossessed, or sold, in public or in private, over the years. The US estimates that 20% of Europe’s art disappeared into the hands of the Germans.

A new multi-million dollar stash seems to show up every year or so, as people or families with whom some of this stuff was sequestered die. And some of the art, generated by those deemed as degenerates by the Reich, was destroyed in public burnings.

The topic is a complex one. Many of the major US museums have posted the items in their collections whose provenance is questioned, and in recent years a few of them have hired staff members to more proactively seek out the history of these pieces. When you visit the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, you encounter an impressive collection of impressionist paintings that were originally looted by the Nazis then claimed as spoils in retribution by the Russian army.

Perhaps most notable is the case of the five paintings by Gustav Klimt, long held by the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, that were awarded in 2006 by a panel of Austrian judges to Maria Altmann, the 90-year-old Los Angeles niece of a Viennese Jew from whom the paintings were stolen in 1938. She subsequently sold the pictures, one of them—the famed Gold Portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer—to Ronald Lauder for a record $135 million. This story is told in a terrific documentary “The Rape of Europa” (2008). Since then, the same story was dramatized with moderate success in the 2015 Helen Mirren film “Woman in Gold” (the documentary is infinitely better), and the 2014 “Monuments Men,” which should have been a lot better than it was.

The holdings of the Hermitage, and the push to restore ownership, are taken up at the end of “Europa” and the poignant point is made – while the sense of restitution still lives in the minds and experiences of the Russian people who are alive and still so strongly affected by WW2, perhaps it is best to simply wait a while before pursuing for justice in the return of these objects. Their conclusion: it is still simply too soon.

“Too Soon?”

For 3 months during mid-2015, Darren Criss memorably played the titular role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway… a 3-month measure of quality over quantity (given that the horrid Spider-Man musical, which I never saw, had finally closed down in 2014, and had gone through 6 months of previews before it even “opened”).

Near the end of the first half of the show, Hedwig ends up with a sheet of music stuck to her foot and laments to Yitzhak – “what, we cannot clean the theater up before we do a show? If I wanted to see a mess on a Broadway stage, I would have seen Spider-Man.”

Audience groan-laughs.

Hedwig looks out into the crowd and asks “Too soon?”

Naturally, the show that gets mentioned changes over time to keep it current.

The phrase “too soon?” is used to respond to someone making a comment that was intended to be funny, but touches on subject matter that perhaps should not be joked about, usually because it was a recent event.

It is hard to track down a true origin, but Gilbert Gottfried’s joke about 9/11, that he told at a Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner mere weeks after the attack, is said to have kicked off the modern age of “too soon.”

His joke: “I have to leave early tonight, I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight — they said I have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

Gottfried says “I don’t think anyone’s lost an audience bigger than I did at that point. They were booing and hissing. One guy said Too soon! He was just a face in the crowd, but now I wish I knew who it was, because his comment became part of the language.”

“Too soon,” Gottfried continues. “I had never heard that before. I knew there were times where people wait to make jokes about something, but I always thought that concept was ridiculous. Is there an office with a guy behind a desk who decides when it’s not too soon anymore?”

A 2014 paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science (studying the use of humor after a bad hurricane) found there was a peak moment to joke about a tragic event – 36 days later. After that, the “funniness” of the joke wears thin, and is seen as merely, well, meh.

“We find that temporal distance creates a comedic sweet spot,” says professor Peter McGraw. “A tragic event is difficult to joke about at first, but the passage of time initially increases humor as the event becomes less threatening. Eventually, however, distance decreases humor by making the event seem completely benign.”