Department of English
- Monday, September 14, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
We are absolutely thrilled to have Julie Nelson Davis (University of Pennsylvania), Interim Director of the Material Texts Workshop, deliver the inaugural presentation for Fall 2026, titled "Invention and Authenticity: Reproduction, Fabrication, and the Modern Market for Ukiyo-e Prints.”
Professor Davis writes:
“In 1918, Frank Lloyd Wright was taken to see a cache of ukiyo-e prints in a secret location outside Tokyo. Believing that it was a collection of pristine impressions, he bought the lot. Soon he learned that he had been deceived: his dealer, Hayashi Kyūgo, had sold him worn, faded impressions that had their color reprinted in order to pass as originals. These “revamps” were traced to the studio of Takamizawa Enji, a renowned restorer as well as the era’s most capable fabricator. In this talk, I will place this episode within the larger frame of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reproduction practices, a time when the terms of authenticity were challenged by replication, refabrication, and reproduction. By tracing Takamizawa’s trajectory from suspected forger to his restitution as the producer of approved reproductions, this talk synthesizes the career of this master artisan within his period context. This case study further demonstrates that authenticity crises in ukiyo-e didn’t arise because reproduction broke the medium’s rules—rather, the problem became the ways in which shifting regimes of value framed the question of what was an “original print” within the modern market for ukiyo-e.”
Julie Nelson Davis is the Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of History of Art and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from Reed College, studied at Gakushūin University in Tokyo, and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Her research spans Japanese prints, illustrated books, and paintings from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (2007, 2021), Partners in Print (2014), and Picturing the Floating World (2021), Davis was also lead curator for the exhibition Arthur Tress and the Japanese Illustrated Book at Penn in 2022. A former President of the Japan Art History Forum and Editor-in-Chief of caa.reviews, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the Clark Art Institute, among others. She will be the inaugural Ishibashi Professor at the University of Zurich in fall 2026 and is also this year’s interim faculty director for the History of Material Text Workshop. This talk comes from her book-in-progress on imitation, homage, and fabrication in ukiyo-e.