So to get the most out of the show you need to read the exhibition labels, the text panels and, most important, the catalog's scholarly essays. You will discover, for example, why there were so many artists named Utagawa: it was the Japanese custom for successful apprentices to take the names of their revered masters.
You will also learn how Utagawa Toyoharu's first two students gravitated toward separate areas of specialization: Toyokuni into Kabuki actor prints and Toyohiro into landscapes. Subsequent generations of artists further diversified - into warrior prints, mythic parodies and other genres - and they sometimes collaborated. Prints in the show, for example, show how Hiroshige and Kunisada combined transcendentally beautiful landscapes and gorgeously attired women.
The reading material provides insight into the complex relationships among artists, craftsmen who cut the wooden blocks, printmakers who pulled the prints, and patrons and publishers who provided financing. Through the artists' strategic efforts, the name Utagawa became a brand so powerful that today more than half of all surviving ukiyo-e prints are from the Utagawa school.
Much of what makes this exhibition enriching may be missed by skipping the catalog. That's all right, because the show is rewarding enough visually. But those who do the reading may emerge with an idea worth thinking about in regard to art today: that an environment of impurity and complexity - moral, economic and otherwise - might be just what a flourishing artistic culture needs.
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