There's No Business Like Show Business

The Kabuki theater was one of the main preoccupations of the “floating world” of 18th-century Edo (modern day Tokyo). While fans idolized actors, the Katsukawa School of artists, active from the mid-1760s to the mid-1790s, created hundreds of pictures of famous performers. In two successive exhibitions, the Art Institute displays some of the more than 700 Katsukawa School prints in the museum’s collection and explores the Kabuki dramas presented.

View more works from this exhibition.