Sketching the Koto Player in the Sackler; photo by H. Wicaksono
Japan Spring is a feast for the ears as well as the eyes. Come listen to the sounds of the koto, the national instrument of Japan, happening now through 2 pm.
Making cherry blossom origami in the Sackler; photo by Hutomo Wicaksono
Not happy with the cherry blossoms outside? Come into the Sackler and make your own! Cherry Blossom origami happening now through 2 pm!
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji: Under the Wave off Kanagawa; H. O Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, Metropolitan Museum of Art (JP1847). Image source: Art Resource, NY
Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji opens Saturday, March 24, as part of our Japan Spring celebration. In honor of the exhibition, Bento presents a series of posts on the life and times of Hokusai, the famed artist behind the esteemed series that includes the iconic print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave. This article was written by Victoria Dawson and previously appeared in Asiatica magazine.
In the 1850′s—the decade after Hokusai’s death—Japan was opened up to the West and paintings and prints began to flow to Europe and into America. Over the next fifty years, Hokusai gradually emerged in Western eyes and in the Western imagination as the Asian artist par excellence. Much has been written about his influence on designs of European and American artists in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, in Vienna, at the 1873 international exhibition, a major exhibition of Hokusai works underscored the high degree of popularity that he enjoyed in the West. But through most of the last century, beyond a relatively small group of researchers and collectors, the artist was largely identified in the popular imagination as a print designer. His most famous work, The Great Wave from the print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1830–33), is virtually synonymous with Japanese art—and so ubiquitous that it can be found almost anywhere that ink can adhere to a surfave—from tote bags to magnets. [The print can be seen at the Sackler Gallery as part of the exhibition on view from March 24 through June 17, 2012.]
Hokusai was someone with a very deep sense that wherever he was, it was not the final place—he was always looking for something beyond. He was an individualist whose art seems infused with a sense of irony, hauntedness, and a search for meaning. His prolific productivity, his cherished independence, and his groundbreaking visual techniques suggest a man who was obsessed with something other than money or social standing.
Then, as now, there were scores and scores of artists who were content with the status quo, satisfying rather than challenging the expectations of their viewers. Not so Hokusai. Consider, for example, the contrast between two prints of waves, created within several years of one another. In The Great Wave, Hokusai presents a rather generous vision of sweeping waves with Mount Fuji in the distance. A print he created only a year or two later offers a claustrophic alternative: In Chosi in Shimosa Province (circa 1833–34, from the series One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean) the waves cleave to a sharp diagonal line, crashing against the jagged rocks and shoals. A second, distant fishing boat offers none of the reassuring stability that Mount Fuji provides in the earlier print.
“There is no escape. Visually, Hokusai doesn’t allow it,” says Jim Ulak, senior curator of Japanese art at the Freer|Sackler. “He seems to say, ‘Well, you were comfortable with The Great Wave? Now, I’ll give you something to be afraid of—a darker vision, a sense of being trapped.’ Why would Hokuasi have done that? Not to make the viewer feel comfortable. You can always expect him to pull the rug out from under you.”
Hokusai: 36 Views of Mt. Fuji opens Saturday, March 24, as part of our Japan Spring celebration. In honor of the exhibition, Bento presents a series of posts on the life and times of Hokusai, the famed artist behind the esteemed series that includes the iconic print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave. This article was written by Victoria Dawson and previously appeared in Asiatica magazine.
What could be more intriguing than the image of a man so unsettled that at the end of his long life he had lived in ninety-three places? Or an artist who changed his professional name so often that one of his contemporaries remarked “no artist ever had more names”? And how can one resist the determination of one who, on his deathbed and with faltering breath, implored the gods to grant him an extension of just five or ten more years—so that he might yet become a true artist? Even an inventory of this man’s possessions—one earthenware pot, two or three teacups, and a single cotton robe—exerts a curious hold on the imagination.
In approaching the art of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), one of Japan’s most renowned artists, it is tempting to linger over the engaging and eccentric facets of his life. Indeed, such colorful images provide ready toeholds as one attempts to grasp the scope of a visual master endowded with boundless creative energy and technical virtuosity. “He was seemingly oblivious to the practicalities of everyday life. Not because he was absent-minded, but because he was single-minded in his devotion to uncovering the truth through the use of his brush,” says James Ulak, senior curator of Japanese art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Hokusai had an abiding desire to excel—not in a competetive worldly way, but as a means for sharing. “For Hokusai, transmission was what art was all about,” says Roger S. Keyes, an art historian and consultant for the 2006 Hokusai exhibition at Freer|Sackler. “It’s what he got out of art, and it’s what he hoped to accomplish through art. It was about transmitting the conviction of what he knew through his experience to others.”
The sheer volume of Hokusai’s brushwork beggars both the imagination and the intellect. Over the course of seven decades, which included occasional periods of profound personal distraction, this “man mad about painting,” as he called himself, created an estimated thirty thousand images—and wrote novels and poetry as well. He turned out ink drawings, paintings, and prints that varied greatly in both subject and format—actor portraits; landscapes; beautiful women; the spiritual and supernatural; legendary figures and historical tales; still life; nature, including birds and flowers; erotica; surimono (highly refined, privately commissioned prints); fan paintings; manga; illustrated albums, books, poetry anthologies; and novels; teaching manuals for artists, and even performance art. His illustrated books alone number some 270 volumes. “There is so much you have to look at before you get a sense of this artist,” says Keyes. “I’ve never caught up with him.”
