Hokusai

• 1. Introduction

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  Hokusai once told a Japanese shogun that a painting of a blue curve smeared with red was a landscape. The red was the trail of a chicken whose feet he had dipped in paint, then chased across the paper. He called it the Tatsuta River with maple leaves floating in it, and he won the competition. This was the same artist who, in 1817, painted a portrait of the Buddhist figure Daruma measuring 18 by 10.8 metres on the ground outside a temple in Nagoya, drawing huge crowds. By the time he died at 88, he had produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and picture-book images. How does a mirror-maker's son from a district of Edo become a man Degas would call a continent? Why did he answer to at least thirty different names? And what made one woodblock print of a wave reach all the way into a French composer's living room?

• 2. A Life In Many Names

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  Hokusai was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime, more pseudonyms than any other major Japanese artist. The practice of changing names was common among Japanese artists of his era. With him it was so frequent, and so closely tied to shifts in his style and output, that scholars use the name changes to divide his life into periods. His master gave him his first new name, Shunrō, after a year of study, and it was under this name that he published his earliest prints in 1779. Around 1800 he adopted the name by which he is most widely known, Katsushika Hokusai. The first part points to the part of Edo where he was born. The second means 'north studio', honouring the North Star, a symbol of a deity important in his religion of Nichiren Buddhism. In 1811, at the age of 51, he took the name Taito and began his art manuals. In 1820 he became Iitsu, and from 1834 he worked as Gakyō Rōjin Manji, which translates as 'The Old Man Mad About Art'. That final name was not vanity. In a colophon, Hokusai wrote that from the age of six he had a passion for copying the form of things. He judged that nothing he drew before seventy was worth taking into account, and dreamed that by one hundred and ten each dot and line would possess a life of its own.

• 3. Breaking From The School

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  At 18, Hokusai entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō, head of the Katsukawa school. The ukiyo-e of artists like Shunshō centred on images of courtesans, called bijin-ga, and kabuki actors, called yakusha-e, the celebrities of Japan's cities. When Shunshō died in 1793, Hokusai began reaching for other styles, including European ones he encountered through French and Dutch copper engravings he managed to acquire. Shunkō, the chief disciple of his late master, expelled him from the school, possibly because he had been studying at the rival Kanō school. Hokusai later called the humiliation a gift. In his own words, what really motivated the development of his artistic style was the embarrassment he suffered at Shunkō's hands. Freed from the school, he turned away from courtesans and actors entirely. His subjects became landscapes and the daily life of Japanese people across social levels. That shift was a breakthrough both for ukiyo-e and for his own career. In 1798 he set out fully on his own, passing an earlier name to a pupil and working as an independent artist, free of any school for the first time.

• 4. The Showman

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  During an Edo festival in 1804, Hokusai created a portrait of the Buddhist prelate Daruma said to cover 200 square metres, working with a broom and buckets of ink. His fame in the following decade rested as much on his talent for self-promotion as on the art itself. The Nagoya feat of 1817 was recounted in a popular song, and earned him the name Daruma Master. Though that giant painting was destroyed in 1945, his promotional handbills from the time survive at the Nagoya City Museum. His collaborations could be turbulent. Between 1804 and 1815 he worked with the popular novelist Takizawa Bakin on illustrated books, including the fantasy novel Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki, published between 1807 and 1811. The partnership ended after thirteen works, blamed variously on clashing personalities and disagreements over how the illustrations should be drawn. He guarded his style fiercely with his craftsmen too. In letters tied to Toshisen Ehon, an edition of a Chinese poetry anthology, he complained that a blockcutter he respected, Egawa Tomekichi, had strayed from his style when carving certain heads. He wrote directly to another cutter, Sugita Kinsuke, saying he disliked the Utagawa school manner in which Kinsuke had carved the eyes and noses, and enclosed examples of his own way alongside the school's.

• 5. Mount Fuji And The Wave

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  Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji emerged in the early 1830s, after Hokusai had taken the name Iitsu in 1820. He created the series in response to a domestic travel boom in Japan and out of a personal fascination with the mountain. It carried his most celebrated images, The Great Wave off Kanagawa and the print known as Red Fuji, also called Fine Wind, Clear Morning. In The Great Wave, Hokusai used what would have seemed a western perspective to convey depth and volume, drawing on the perspectival studies he had worked through in his Manga. The series proved so popular that ten more prints were later added beyond the original thirty-six. The Manga itself had begun as a money-making venture. Its first volume of random drawings appeared in 1814 and was an immediate success, and by 1820 he had produced twelve volumes, with three more published after his death. Other series followed, including A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces, Oceans of Wisdom, and Unusual Views of Celebrated Bridges in the Provinces. He also turned to flowers and birds, the genre called kachō-e, in finely detailed images such as Poppies and Flock of Chickens.

• 6. Working Until The End

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  In 1839 a fire destroyed Hokusai's studio and much of his work, just as younger artists like Andō Hiroshige were drawing the public's attention away. At 83 he traveled to Obuse in Shinano Province, now Nagano Prefecture, at the invitation of a wealthy farmer named Takai Kozan, and stayed for several years. There he produced masterpieces including the Masculine Wave and the Feminine Wave. Between 1842 and 1843 he performed what he called daily exorcisms, painting Chinese lions every morning in ink as a talisman against misfortune. He worked nearly to the last, painting The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mt Fuji and Tiger in the Snow in early 1849. His daughter Ei, also known as Ōi, had become an artist and his assistant, and her own story would later inspire the manga and film Miss Hokusai. On his deathbed he reportedly cried out that with just five or ten more years from Heaven he could become a real painter. He died on the 10th of May 1849 and was buried at the Seikyō-ji temple in Tokyo. A haiku he composed shortly before reads: 'Though as a ghost, I shall lightly tread, the summer fields'.

• 7. An Island, A Continent

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  Degas said of Hokusai that he was not just one artist among others in the Floating World, but an island, a continent, a whole world in himself. That admiration spread through Japonism, the European craze for collecting Japanese art that began in the mid-19th century. One of the first sparks came around 1856, when the French printmaker Félix Bracquemond found a copy of a Hokusai sketchbook at the workshop of his printer, August Dalatre. Bracquemond used it to design the Rousseau Service, a set of dinnerware with birds and fish copied from the Japanese illustrations and placed asymmetrically against white. Exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867, it was a critical and commercial success. His prints were collected by Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Franz Marc, August Macke, Édouard Manet, and van Gogh, and his influence touched the Impressionists, Art Nouveau, and the German Jugendstil. The French composer Claude Debussy kept an impression of The Great Wave hanging in his living room. His tone poem La Mer, which debuted in 1905, is believed to have been inspired by it, and he specifically asked that the print appear on the cover of the published score. The reach continues into other media: the science fiction writer Roger Zelazny won a Hugo Award for a short story whose protagonist tours the Mount Fuji area, stopping at the very locations Hokusai once painted.