Hokusai, June 6th 2015 P69 (北斎)
Katsushika Hokusai, a Japanese printmaker who died in 1849 aged nearly 90, is one of those artists whose long, impressive career has come to be known for a single iconic work. During his lifetime his images of Mt Fuji and his floral prints were widely imitated in the West. But “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)” is so famous, and has been reproduced in such a wide variety of contexts and formats, that it has swamped his other achievements. It is a testament to the complexity of Hokusai's oeuvre and the depth of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston that in wandering through its new exhibition dedicated to the great Japanese printmaker, one could easily overlook this familiar image among the many riches on display. Surrounded by a host of equally inventive and beautifully crafted prints, paintings and drawings, “The Great Wave” appears as an exemplary, but not exceptional, representative of a versatile master's work.
One of the revelations of this show is how fresh Hokusai's works manage to feel two centuries after they were created. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he worked largely for a popular audience. Many of his woodblock prints - including his most famous series, “Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji”(which includes both “The Great Wave” and another well-known work, “Red Mt Fuji”) - were well within many people's reach, costing, according to Sarah Thompson, the MFA's assistant curator for Japanese prints, about “the price of a big bowl of noodle soup”.
Working in this vernacular mode, Hokusai eschewed high-flown rhetoric and pompous symbolism in favour of images that entertain with anecdote and delight with their bright colour and eyecatching compositions. Like media-savvy artists of recent decades, Hokusai appealed to the mass market rather than serving the interests of court or temple. And, like many contemporary artists, he was a master showman, enticing potential customers with bravura performances. On one occasion he whipped up over the course of a few hours a 66-foot-high (20-metre) portrait in ink of Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, a crowd-pleasing stunt that can be seen as a forerunner of 20th-century performance art.
Another reason Hokusai's art feels so modern is that to a large extent it forms the springboard for the West's own leap into the future. When Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh first saw Hokusai's prints, with their vivid colours and startling off-kilter points of view, it sparked a revolution in their own art. Similarly, the whiplash lines and stylised natural forms of Art Nouveau sway to the rhythms of Hnkusai's distinctive lines.
One irony highlighted by this show is that whereas Hokusai's prints were prized in Europe for their “exotic” Japonisme, he himself was unusually receptive to Western influences. He often adopts a version of vanishing-point perspective, learned from studying the European artworks that found their way into Japan's closed society through the port of Nagasaki.
Despite Hokusai's fascination for this foreign invention, though, vanishing-point perspective remained just another tool to enliven a landscape or interior scene, not a scientific means of uncovering the secrets of nature；it was one more “effect” to add to his already capacious bag of visual tricks. His “Newly Published Perspective Picture：One Hundred Ghost Stories in a Haunted House” reveals how Hokusai exploited the telescoping view of bizarre ends, giving his ghouls a plausible space within which to enact their implausible drama.
Above all, Hokusai was a master of line and pattern, inscribing his forms within contours that eddy and spill like the currents of a mountain stream. He styled himself “The Man Mad about Drawing”, and his mastery of abstract quality of line that so captivated the early modernists in Europe is everywhere in evidence. This is true whether he is tracing the undulations of a carp nestled among the reeds or a beautiful woman priming in front of a mirror. “Hokusai” explores in depth the complex legacy of an inventive and thoroughly delightful master.
One of the revelations of this show is how fresh Hokusai's works manage to feel two centuries after they were created. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he worked largely for a popular audience. Many of his woodblock prints - including his most famous series, “Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji”(which includes both “The Great Wave” and another well-known work, “Red Mt Fuji”) - were well within many people's reach, costing, according to Sarah Thompson, the MFA's assistant curator for Japanese prints, about “the price of a big bowl of noodle soup”.
Working in this vernacular mode, Hokusai eschewed high-flown rhetoric and pompous symbolism in favour of images that entertain with anecdote and delight with their bright colour and eyecatching compositions. Like media-savvy artists of recent decades, Hokusai appealed to the mass market rather than serving the interests of court or temple. And, like many contemporary artists, he was a master showman, enticing potential customers with bravura performances. On one occasion he whipped up over the course of a few hours a 66-foot-high (20-metre) portrait in ink of Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, a crowd-pleasing stunt that can be seen as a forerunner of 20th-century performance art.
Another reason Hokusai's art feels so modern is that to a large extent it forms the springboard for the West's own leap into the future. When Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh first saw Hokusai's prints, with their vivid colours and startling off-kilter points of view, it sparked a revolution in their own art. Similarly, the whiplash lines and stylised natural forms of Art Nouveau sway to the rhythms of Hnkusai's distinctive lines.
One irony highlighted by this show is that whereas Hokusai's prints were prized in Europe for their “exotic” Japonisme, he himself was unusually receptive to Western influences. He often adopts a version of vanishing-point perspective, learned from studying the European artworks that found their way into Japan's closed society through the port of Nagasaki.
Despite Hokusai's fascination for this foreign invention, though, vanishing-point perspective remained just another tool to enliven a landscape or interior scene, not a scientific means of uncovering the secrets of nature；it was one more “effect” to add to his already capacious bag of visual tricks. His “Newly Published Perspective Picture：One Hundred Ghost Stories in a Haunted House” reveals how Hokusai exploited the telescoping view of bizarre ends, giving his ghouls a plausible space within which to enact their implausible drama.
Above all, Hokusai was a master of line and pattern, inscribing his forms within contours that eddy and spill like the currents of a mountain stream. He styled himself “The Man Mad about Drawing”, and his mastery of abstract quality of line that so captivated the early modernists in Europe is everywhere in evidence. This is true whether he is tracing the undulations of a carp nestled among the reeds or a beautiful woman priming in front of a mirror. “Hokusai” explores in depth the complex legacy of an inventive and thoroughly delightful master.
