Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens the other day to check out Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950 (through September 2) and say, it was swell.

“Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950” explores how sheet music covers provide a window into Japanese society and culture during this period of immense transformation. Visitors discover how leading Japanese graphic designers of the day interpreted modernist international art movements like Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and how demand for military sheet music with propagandist images grew in the 1920s and ’30s, reflecting the country’s imperialist aspirations. Through investigating styles of graphic design, bold typography, genres of music, and the societal environment in Japan, visitors get a glimpse of how design and music celebrating modernity and globalism gave way to endorsing nationalism.

The exhibit includes “about 100 sheet music covers from the collection of Mary and Robert Levenson—alongside paintings, photographs, textiles, music, film clips, and musical instruments from the period.”

Representative samples . . .

As Mark Feeney wrote in his Boston Globe review, “The flatness and solid colors of traditional Japanese prints did so much to influence — and liberate — Western artists in the late 19th century. The work of those artists in turn did so much to influence the Japanese artists responsible for these graphic designs. It’s an artistic case of wheels within wheels — or, if you prefer, frames within frames.”

As well as songs within songs.

Totally worth a trundle.