The Greatest Wave

Let’s stay on this topic of the art world’s most iconic images, since I was able to see one recently, and those visiting the DC area during the next month can see it as well. This one is Asian, and the popularity of a Japanese woodblock print known as the The Great Wave (ca 1830), made Katsushika Hokusai Japan’s most famous artist.  It can be seen along with the other images made in the series in Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery of Art through June 17.

Hokusai  The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

Born in 1760 in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai showed an early aptitude for art and was trained for a time as a block-cutter for making prints, one of the only designers in the field known to have any training in this work.

The stories of Hokusai’s life are legendary. In 1817 he organized a crew to paint a 60 ft. high picture of a favorite Buddhist saint. Not being satisfied he went on to create a painting with an ordinary brush of two sparrows that could only be seen with a magnifying glass. He lived in 93 different houses during his life and used more than 30 artistic aliases, changing names with his various styles.

In his sixties and deep in debt due to a grandson’s gambling, he needed work and created the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Besides being the beloved significant geographical landmark of central Japan, Fuji was considered sacred. Hokusai’s images were revolutionary, partly due to his use of a new Prussian blue color, but also his use of ordinary people walking or working, or even viewing the scene, as a part of it.

In The Great Wave, Mout Fuji is a tiny peak in the distance, the wave itself is the central figure as viewers can just make out the tops of the boatmen’s bald heads as the lean over on their oars. The series was so popular that after the first thirty-six prints were published he created another ten. Examples of all forty-six images are in the exhibit, including one of the last that does not include Mount Fuji’s famous silhouette. It depicts religious pilgrims climbing on the mountain itself.

At one point Hokusai gave himself the name “The Old Man Mad About Art” and in his seventies wrote “...nothing I did before seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stoke I paint will be alive.” He lived to be eighty-nine.

This link is from the BBC series Private Life of a Masterpiece about Hokusai's Great Wave. All five parts can be viewed on You Tube. 

One of the interesting aspects of Hokusai’s legacy is that art historians recognize that that he was influenced, at least indirectly by Western art. He would have seen the works created by Shiba Kokan who had studied Western art images and had been an advocate of it. Some of Hokusai’s earlier images show a clear influence. Later in the 19^th century along with other Japanese print designer Hokusai’s images would go on to help inspire the European impressionists.

The link to the Hokusai website at the Freer & Sackler Galleries site is just below. By clicking on that link you will be taken away from Tripping on History and will go to the museum site.
Hokusai