The eponymous exhibition commemorating the 130th year since the death of Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-89) at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is the latest in a crescendo of Kyosai exhibitions. The 200-odd works on show celebrate the eccentric painter and printmaker's pictorial diversity produced within 19th-century Japan's social restructuring and modernizing tumult.
The crests and troughs of Kyosai's reputation are almost alarming. An overachieving infant, he sketched at age 3, studied ukiyo-e with Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) from 7 and joined the Surugadai branch of the late-traditional Kano school of painting at age 10.
Ukiyo-e and Kano practices did not usually go hand in hand. The former was often used by Kyosai for coruscating satire. "Repelling of the Mongol Pirate Ships" (1863), for example, depicts the Mongol invasions of the Kamakura Period (1185-1333), while alluding to a contemporary attack by Choshu clan forces on an American merchant ship anchored in the Shimonoseki Straits.