They were small, mass-produced, and the artist’s hand never touched the works. But the woodblock prints of the Japanese artist Kuniyoshi are masterpieces, and this exhilarating show, which brings together 150 of them from the endless goldmine of the British Museum’s prints department, is easily one the contenders for London exhibition of the year.

Born in 1797, Utagawa Kuniyoshi was a younger contemporary of Hokusai, whose prints of Mount Fuji, especially the one with the curling “Great Wave” are the most famous images of Japanese art. Working in the same style, also a master of the “Floating World” school, Kuniyoshi’s career spans the first half of the 19th century.

He lived in Edo, at the time the largest city in the world, with more than a million inhabitants. He was at the apex of an art market unimaginably different from our own, where there was no distinction between high and popular culture.

He was incredibly prolific, designing an estimated 10,000 prints. These were printed up by master craftsmen in their thousands and sold cheaply to merchants, artisans and the odd discerning samurai. Art-world elitism was frowned upon by the puritanical imperial authorities, who issued edicts limiting how much artists could charge for their prints — just the price of a bowl of noodles.

The exhibition is well-organised with different rooms devoted to the various themes Kuniyoshi covered. Portraits of warriors and the mythological and battle scenes, with which Kuniyoshi made his name in the 1820s, are followed by geishas with languorous smiles and exotic headgear. The landscapes have an appropriately zen serenity — sailing boats idle on calm lakes while blue-black mountains rise up in the distance through a haze. Then come the Kabuki theatre scenes, comic prints — look out for the dazzling portraits whose heads, on close inspection, turn out to be made of intertwined human bodies — and finally brilliant small erotic images full of anthropomorphised sex organs.

Kuniyoshi’s handling of line and colour are breathtaking: he could whip up the scowl on the face of a warrior and the pout of a geisha in a few flicks of his ink brush. But the key to Kuniyoshi is the way he builds mesmerising surfaces and action-packed stories out of patterns, whether it is the scales of a fish, the waves of a stormy ocean, fighting warriors’ body armour or autumn leaves floating down a river.

He was also a great innovator. His new panoramic “triptych” prints, made from three different sheets, were the widescreen cinema of his day. And he was also a great subversive, who played a cat-and-mouse game with the state. He got round the ban on sex scenes by depicting a brothel where all the hookers were sparrows, and when the state forbade the depiction of actors of the day, Kuniyoshi found a way round that, too: he made a cheeky print, depicting a wall covered in graffiti portraits of those celebrities.

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