Artist of the Floating World: Katsushiiko Hokusai
Beyond
the Great Wave – The Art of Katsushiko Hokusai (1760 – 1848) at the British
Museum
Katsushiko Hokusai was
born in Edo (Tokyo) in 1760. Europe was
simultaneously engulfed in the Seven Years War.
Then Edo had one million inhabitants like London. Hokusai had many names but the name Hokusai
was adopted when the artist was 39 and is the most common of all the pseudonyms
he used. Another one is Gakyo Rojin Manji or The Old Man Crazy
to Paint. His childhood name was Tokitaro
(later Tetsuzo), he was adopted by the mirror-maker Nakajima Ise. In his teens, he trained as a woodblock
cutter and by the time he was 20 he became part of the floating world school
(ukiyo-e) by joining the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho. Shunsho was a leading floating world artist
and Hokusai stayed with him until his death in 1792. Throughout his forties and fifties Hokusai
completed many illustrations for popular fiction and special commissions for
figurative paintings. These
illustrations evoke nostalgia for the period of the classical Samurai who
fought with longbow and two-handed sword.
This era was now in the remote past as muskets and later rifles had been
adopted by the Japanese since Renaissance times. There are also depictions of goddesses and
dragons for Hokusai was born in the
year of the dragon and the creature would become a symbol recurring throughout
his art to the very end of his long life.
Hokusai considered only
the efforts made after his seventieth year to be worthy of contemplation, he
firmly believed that only if he practised everyday that his art would ever improve. Hokusai had been drawing from his earliest
years and later engaged with the commercial art of print making. He produced many influential prints, until,
in later life, he withdrew steadily from commercial activity. Overall this exhibition attempts to frame
Hokusai’s life within an understanding of the Western discourse of ‘great men’
which is why it is a bit puzzling to the viewer that the focus is only on later
works. Great Western artists have
different ‘periods’. But Hokusai cannot
quite be configured in such a way and his work is more comprehensible within
the tradition of Buddhism that he followed.
As he documents the different stages of existence, Western concepts such
as ‘art’, ‘tradition’ or ‘genre’ tend to fade away.
In his 60s Hokusai
encountered a period of hardship, he had endured a stroke among other things,
before embarking on his most creative phase.
Hokusai began working with imported European art techniques such as
perspective and he also worked with new materials too. He used the Old Dutch paper obtained from the
Dutch East India Company or VOC and new pigments, primarily Prussian blue. He thus moved on from book illustration and
the creation of silk screens embroidered with his designs based on genres,
characters and incidents in Japanese mythology and history to a medium which is
more obviously approachable just as ‘Western art’ is. But these are not mere pale imitations but
new ways of seeing which are also typically Japanese. His portfolio of prints, 36 views of Mount
Fuji contains examples of his work with the new pigment, Prussian blue, invented
in Germany in the 18th century, used to signify the time just before
dawn when everything seems nuanced, shaded, waking. A peasant in his little boat throws water
from his rice bowl into a paddy field.
Labourers work indefatigably in the shadow of the volcano but ignore
this sleeping giant since it is an everyday sight to them. Travellers throw their arms around a great
cedar tree so that they might measure it.
Pilgrims cower in the safety of a cave on the flanks of Mount Fuji. The volcano was also a deity to the Japanese
and climbing to the summit was also a form of worship, an essential pilgrimage
for every Japanese. Hokusai was a
Buddhist and his religious views inform but fail to alter the style or
techniques of his art even when his subject matter is blatantly religious.
Above all it is Hokusai’s
work The Great Wave off Kanagawa
(1832) that summarises his lifetimes achievement. The reasons for this are not immediately
obvious but become clearer when the paintings context is understood. We glimpse Mount Fuji through the great wave,
specks of foam fall on the distant peak like snow flakes. Three boats filled with sailors, strain and
struggle to stay afloat. The wave
appears to overshadow the enormous volcano (a peak that seems to overshadow the
rest of the landscape). Hokusai is
incorporating Western techniques of perspective to demonstrate that Mount Fuji
is only relative to the natural world that surrounds it, being no more and no
less a deity than the great wave is.
Hokusai, known at the
time of his creation of The Great Wave as Litsu, went on
painting into his
80s. His typical subjects were still
lives, depicting flowers, birds and frogs, waterfalls and bridges. In fact, Hokusai was commissioned to paint
many of the bridges in his region of Japan.
He also produced a bird’s eye view depiction of China, Japan’s sprawling
neighbour of which little was known. The
depiction came purely from his imagination since travel abroad was forbidden in
the Edo period which began in 1615 and ended about 1869. Hokusai was delighted to travel in his mind,
like later artists whose lives were controlled by Totalitarian and other
authoritarian regimes. Isolation
permeates the art of Hokusai.
In later years Hokusai
lived with his daughter Oi in Edo. He
lived within the complex of buildings which included the Shogun’s castle and
the pleasure zone, Yoshiwara. Oi was
also an artist, in fact her name means ‘follower of Litsu’, Hokusai’s later
pseudonym.
Hokusai’s later works
include ghosts and demons among many deluxe commissions but also manga. Hokusai created many books of manga (which
means a rough, spontaneous sketch). His
style encapsulates a rough, manga-like spontaneity alongside figurative work
that is deeply considered in terms of style, composition, subject matter and
technique.
Hokusai died in Edo not
far from his birthplace and his tomb is also in the vicinity. Hokusai was the miniaturist who painted in
series with a sparkling spontaneity as well as his own private Buddhistic
beliefs that inform his work. He
imported western techniques to complete the direction of Japanese art, ensuring
that modernity surmounted tradition. He
was also influential in the West, informing the work of many members of the
avant-garde such as Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat as well as many
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.
Above all he was part of the vogue for Japanese things known as Japonism
in the late 19th century.
Hokusai establishes a bridge between east and west, a bridge which would
develop through the new art movements springing up in Germany and France.
Paul Murphy, The British Museum, June 2017
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