Katsushika Hokusai‘s woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawaoki namiura),” also known as the “Great Wave” (about 1830-31), from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei),” has had an outsize influence on modern and contemporary culture, which continues to this day. (William Sturgis Bigelow Collection / photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
‘Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration’ exhibit at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art demonstrates the Japanese master’s sweeping influence from the 19th century to the present
The “Mona Lisa” by da Vinci, “The Scream” by Munch, and the “Great Wave” by Hokusai are three of the most recognizable images in the world. The imprints of these masterworks have either graced or defiled, depending on your viewpoint, everything from coffee mugs to sweatshirts to erasers. But only Katsushika Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” as persuasively demonstrated in the inspiring and comprehensive exhibit “Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration,” has had an outsize influence on modern and contemporary culture, which continues to this day.
Besides its impact on the Japonisme movement in the Western arts during the late 19th and early 20th century, Hokusai’s mesmerizing tidal scene — its full name is “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” — continues to stimulate an extraordinarily diverse set of creatives in the fields of painting, sculpture, music, literature, decorative art, film, anime and couture. Entire books have been written about this one woodblock print. Its image is reproduced on Japanese currency.
“Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration” was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show is thoughtfully installed, and the very readable texts, edited by the Nelson’s assistant curator of Japanese Art, Yoyoi Shinoda, help to parse the creation of each historic artwork. And if you don’t care to read, the sheer beauty, wit and occasional humor of the woodcuts, drawings and paintings will still sweep you away.
The exhibit tracks not only the various aspects of Hokusai’s long career — this singular artist produced more than 30,000 woodblock prints, paintings, book images and sketches — but the impact his innovative reworking of traditional Japanese motifs had on virtually all his peers and competitors. Hokusai was known by at least 30 names throughout his career, related to changes in his art. Although “pseudonyms” were common in Japan, Hokusai had more than any other Japanese artist.
Hokusai (1760–1849) worked in the Katsukawa school until 1792, then was briefly part of a smaller organization. But from 1798 he was a free agent. He elevated the importance of landscape and genre art and was the first to produce serious renderings of birds, flora and fauna. His aesthetic adventurousness, Shinoda said in a recent interview, was because Hokusai “opened up to things outside of Japan. He loved anatomical studies, and didn’t just look at fine art — he studied anatomy books, and looked at Chinese literature and art. He was also aware of Western art, and its use of perspective.”
In general, the Japanese arts were practiced differently from arts in the West during this time. There was a “porosity of genres,” as scholars have noted, because in pre-modern Japan there were no copyright laws. As Dr. Sybil Thornton, a scholar of Japanese film, said in a recent interview: “On the whole, narratives jumped from performer to performer, from Rakugo (comic storytelling) to Kodan (serious storytelling), from Kodan to Kabuki, from Kabuki to woodblock prints, and (ultimately) from any source to film . . .” So copying one another’s art, instead of being considered taboo, was actually a form of honor, and the exhibition reveals how Hokusai’s prints were imitated by his students as well as other artists, even after his death.
Hokusai worked during the Edo period, when prints were considered a lower-class art form, chiefly purchased by merchants, who ranked lowest in Japan’s caste system. Hokusai was a great painter, but it was with his prints and books that he achieved his greatest financial success and artistic impact. His prodigious output was possible because artists were only responsible for drawing the imagery for woodcuts; the actual time-consuming process of making the print was left to artisans.
Money was always a problem for Hokusai, and in 1812 he created a series of art manuals, or sketchbooks, as a way to make a profit and attract new students. Ultimately, he produced 12 volumes, which included drawings of plants, animals, people and religious figures. They were enormously popular. His fame spread, and he was commissioned to illustrate a series of books by a popular novelist.
Hokusai also created several albums of erotic art (shunga). The exhibit displays his most famous image, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” which depicts a beautiful woman sexually entwined with a pair of octopuses, an image that became very popular and again resulted in multiple recreations by other artists.
Even more popular was Hokusai’s series “One Hundred Ghost Stories,” begun in 1830. His extraordinary depictions of the dead and demonic continue to have an impact on manga, anime and film to this day. Hokusai’s ghost drawings were startling to Westerners and proved a major inspiration to such 19th-century European artists as Odilon Redon. Books of Hokusai’s ghosts are still in print, while such animated classics as “Spirited Away” carry on Hokusai’s definitions of the otherworldly.
At this same time Hokusai produced what became his most celebrated body of work, “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” which began with the “Great Wave.” Hokusai later added 10 more prints to the series, which was an immediate sensation. “This work,” Shinoda said, “attained a much bigger presence than Hokusai ever intended it to be.”
The exhibit beautifully displays some of the multiple effects of Hokusai’s famous wave throughout the 19th century until today, with examples of ceramics, major paintings, prints and sculpture. Everyone from van Gogh to Winslow Homer to Yoshitoma Nara have appropriated Hokusai’s imagery. Perhaps because of its essentially abstract nature, the “Great Wave” can be read in a multiplicity of ways. It can represent danger, even death and the sublime; its clawlike shape works well as a decorative strategy; and finally, it can be seen and felt as a spiritual parable. While the Great Wave threatens to swallow up the three hapless boats and their occupants, Mount Fuji resides in the background, impassable and solid, unthreatened by whatever forces the Great Wave can unleash. It remains a beacon, no matter the forces of the unknown.
“Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston” continues at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak St., through Jan. 5. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday-Monday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. For more information, 816.751.1278 or www.nelson-atkins.org.
