The year was 1992. Officials the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art, now called the Chazen Museum of Art, had been asked by curators in Japan if they could borrow some of the UW museum’s 2,000 woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) for a show of his art work in his native Japan.
In turn, Elvehjem officials asked the Japanese what it would take to raise their already world-class collection of Hiroshige prints to an even higher level.
So began a kind of artistic detective story that reached its climax this fall.