Hokusai: the Great Wave that swept the world
H ad Katsushika Hokusai died when he was struck by lightning at the age of 50 in 1810, he would be remembered as a popular artist of the ukiyo-e, or “floating world” school of Japanese art, but hardly the great figure we know today. His late blooming (the subject of an exhibition, Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, opening at the British Museum next week) was spectacular – it was only in his 70s that he made his most celebrated print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including the famous Great Wave, an image that subsequently swept over the world. “Until the age of 70,” he once wrote (self-consciously parodying Confucius) “nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.”
Fuji appears in Thirty-Six Views in many different guises, sometimes centre-stage, elsewhere as background detail. The first five in the series were printed entirely in shades of blue (a combination of traditional indigo and Prussian blue, a recently invented chemical pigment), suggesting views of the mountain at dawn, seen now from a beach, now from a neighbouring island, now as passenger boats and cargo vessels head out over Edo bay.
Hokusai gradually introduced colour into the series, delicate pinks and darker shadows, to show the illumination of the world as the sun creeps up over the horizon. The print Ejiri, Suruga Province shows early morning on a desolate patch of the Tōkaidō highway, Mount Fuji drawn with a single line, while in the foreground a group of travellers are struck by a gust of wind that sends hats and papers flying in the air. It is one of my favourite of the Thirty-Six Views. In Japan the best-loved print is Clear Day with a Southern Breeze. Included in the British Museum exhibition, an early impression of this print shows the delicate atmospheric effects of sunrise, lost in later printings probably made without Hokusai’s direct supervision.
Early impressions of the Great Wave, or Under the Wave off Kanagawa, are just as subtle in their colouring: atmospheric pink and grey in the sky, deep Prussian blue in the folds of the sea. Fishing skiffs are lost in the waves, while the great wall of water, with its finger-like tendrils, threatens to engulf both them and the tiny Mount Fuji in the distance. That the Great Wave became the best known print in the west was in large part due to Hokusai’s formative experience of European art.
Prints from early in his career show him attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt from European prints brought into Japan by Dutch traders. By the time of Under the Wave, the sense of deep space was far more subtle. The rigid converging lines of European perspective drawing become the gently sloping sides of the sacred mountain. In all other ways it could not have been further from anything being made in Europe at the time.
I would love to see an impression of Hokusai’s delicately coloured print hung next to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, painted just over a decade previously, in which a similar large wave is about to crash down on frail humanity. The contrast, and extreme modernity of Hokusai’s print, was certainly on the mind of those post-impressionist painters who so admired his work. You can still see prints by Hokusai, alongside Utamaro and Hiroshige, lining Monet’s dining room at Giverny; Rodin and Van Gogh were also enthusiastic collectors.
Hokusai signed his Thirty-Six Views with the name Iitsu, adding for clarification that he was “the former Hokusai”. It was common in Japan, as in China, for artists to adopt different names throughout their careers, marking different stages of life, and perhaps also as a way of refreshing the brand. He adopted the name Hokusai (“North Studio”) in his late 40s, when he became an independent artist, leaving his teaching job and striking out on his own.
By the time he created his second great tribute to Mount Fuji, three volumes comprising One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (in fact there were 102 views) he was using the artist names Gakyō rōjin (“Old Man Crazy to Paint”), and Manji (“Ten Thousand Things”, or “Everything”). There is indeed a spirit of crazy comprehensiveness to One Hundred Views, all the mad invention and curiosity of the manga combined with the exquisite technique of the Thirty-Six Views. Timothy Clark, the curator of the British Museum exhibition, describes One Hundred Views as “one of the greatest illustrated books” ever printed, and it is difficult to disagree. The drawings are brilliantly conceived, and the prints beautifully made, the woodblock carvers reproducing Hokusai’s line so accurately that we think we are looking at the drawings themselves, rather than carved and printed copies.
In the studio was a sign – ‘We strictly refuse to paint albums or fans’ – although they probably took on the work anyway
It’s important to remember that Hokusai was a thoroughly commercial artist, relying on a large turnover of sales of his low-cost prints and the many illustrated books he produced throughout his life. Despite his artistic success, he seems to have been permanently on the brink of bankruptcy, largely a result of financial ineptness. After the death of his second wife, in 1828, Hokusai’s daughter, Katsushika Ōi, returned to live with her father and provided him with support. Ōi was herself a talented painter and worked alongside her father in their cramped and messy studio.
An image of their situation is preserved in a memory-sketch by Tsuyuki Kōshō, one of Hokusai’s pupils, showing the master in rented lodgings, covered by a quilt, hunched over an ink painting on the tatami mat. Ōi watches him intently, smoking a long tobacco pipe. An inscription on the drawing says that rubbish was piled in the corner of the studio, food wrappings and other detritus. On the wall hung a sign: “We strictly refuse to paint albums or fans” – although you can imagine them taking on the work anyway.
The small handful of Ōi’s paintings that survive show her prodigious talent as an artist. Recent research has shown how she might have contributed to her father’s late paintings, which contain elements of her style such as elongated fingers, and depictions of beautiful courtesans (drawn from life in the pleasure district of Yoshiwara, if the 2015 anime film Miss Hokusai is anything to go by).
One of her most impressive paintings, Hua Tuo Operating on the Arm of Guan Yu, a scene from the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, has a violent intensity and macabre quality quite unlike her father’s painting. Blood spurts from the arm of the general Guan Yu, who has taken nothing but a bowl of rice wine as anaesthetic, and continues with a game of go. It is one of the few authenticated paintings by Ōi, who disappears from the records following her father’s death in 1849.
Set alongside his prints, Hokusai’s rarely exhibited late paintings – large hanging scrolls on silk and paper – strike a different note. The subjects are often fantastical: a great dragon writhes in a rain cloud rising above Mount Fuji; a seven-headed dragon deity flies in the sky above the monk Nichiren (Hokusai was a devout follower), sitting on a mountain top reading from a sutra scroll.
In small reproduction (the only form I have seen them in), they can appear a little like commercial illustrations, lacking the sense of emotional and atmospheric depth of his prints. A grinning tiger bounding through the snow, painted just a few months before Hokusai’s death, looks almost too quaint and jolly. All the more reason to make the journey to the British Museum and see them in the flesh. As with Hokusai’s prints, the real qualities of colour and surface, of detailed brushwork and painstaking construction, reveal themselves only on close and lingering inspection.
In his 80s, Hokusai was said to draw a Chinese lion or lion dancer every morning, throwing it out of the window to ward off ill luck. A number of these “daily exorcism” drawings still exist (probably thanks to Ōi running out to collect them up), and they are among his most lively and charming works. Hokusai’s only bad luck was to die 10 years short of his century, and never in his own mind to reach the state of artistic immortality, which he estimated would occur at the age of 110 when, as he once wrote, “Each dot, each line, will possess a life of its own.”
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave is at the British Museum, London WC1B, from 25 May to 13 August, and at the Abeno Harukas Art Museum, Osaka, from 6 October to 19 November.
Hokusai and Debussy’s Evocations of the Sea
Cover of the 1905 first edition of Debussy’s La Mer published by A. Durand & Fils. Image courtesy of Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music
Numerous representations of the sea are woven into the work of Claude Debussy (1862–1918). The French composer regularly referenced his awe of the sea and its power, and even noted that he had “intended for the noble career of a sailor” in a 1912 letter to close friend and composer André Messager. Although the sea had already played a recurring character throughout much of his piano music, the first appearance of this subject in Debussy’s orchestral output was the final movement of his 1899 work Trois Nocturnes, “Sirènes,” in which he gave life to the deadly mythological seductresses by adding a wordless female choir to the standard orchestral forces.
Debussy’s treatment of the sea as a musical subject is paramount in what many critics and audiences alike consider to be his orchestral magnum opus, 1905’s La Mer. However, despite the evocative titles of the work’s three movements—”From Dawn to Noon on the Sea,” “Play of the Waves,” and “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea”—La Mer is an example of the composer’s wish to create atmospheric music, rather than anything conventionally representational. Debussy was highly critical of overtly programmatic music, and once remarked in a published review of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony that music should “not attempt at direct imitation, but rather [capture] the invisible sentiments of nature.” So instead of seeking to portray storms, waves, and crying birds in an obvious manner, Debussy sought to distill the essence of his many seaside memories while composing the piece in landlocked Burgundy and Paris.
Another key element in the creation of La Mer comes in the form of Hokusai’s iconic “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”—also known as “the Great Wave”—its popularity emblematic of the japonisme movement that overtook France in the mid-nineteenth century. While a student in Rome from 1885–87, Debussy was often rummaging through the city’s antique shops and purchasing Japanese artifacts to take back to Paris. It comes as no surprise, then, that his studio would retain many of these objects, and chief among the Japanese artwork Debussy kept on his walls was a framed print of Hokusai’s “Great Wave.”
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849). “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura),” also known as “the Great Wave,” from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) , ca. 1830–32. Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper; 10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847)
Cultural circles throughout Europe greatly admired Hokusai’s work—a result of the 1853 treaty that opened commercial trade between Japan and the West and therefore created a prolific market for Japanese art, particularly in France. Major artists of the Impressionist movement such as Monet owned copies of Hokusai prints, and leading art critic Philippe Burty, in his 1866 Chefs-d’oeuvre des Arts industriels, even stated that Hokusai’s work maintained the elegance of Watteau, the fantasy of Goya, and the movement of Delacroix. Going one step further in his lauded comparisons, Burty wrote that Hokusai’s dexterity in brush strokes was comparable only to that of Rubens.
The aesthetic parallels between Hokusai and Debussy within their respective disciplines are many, as both artists chose style over realism and placed an intense focus on brilliant color and vibrant energy. Just as Japanese art of the Edo period prized decorative motives independent of system or conventional development, so did Debussy have distaste for formal structure, motivic development, and the use of strict musical forms that composers adhered to during the Classical and Romantic periods.
Claude Debussy in his Paris studio, with Hokusai’s “Great Wave” displayed on the rear wall. Photograph by Igor Stravinsky, 1910. Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel
For both artists, creating dynamic new colors and a sense of motion was of chief importance, and their work moves well beyond that of mere portraiture. The ferocious height and terrifying form of Hokusai’s wave are amplified by his use of the then-rare “Prussian blue” and a jarring sense of perspective that keeps the eye from focusing on the print’s primary subject, Mount Fuji. As such, Debussy’s sea isn’t composed of cymbal crashes and fluttering flutes that allude to a literal oceanic sound, but instead the composer uses a group of sixteen cellos (twice the number found in a standard orchestra) to breathe life into a heaving, slowly blossoming chorale in the first movement, and pentatonic harmonies to create a sense of the ocean’s vast expanse. In fact, one of the only differences between the two artists lies in their portrayal of the sea’s power: Hokusai highlights the cultural fear of the water that ominously surrounded his country, whereas Debussy imbues his work with a sense of wistful nostalgia at the respite the coast provides in his.
Detail of page four of Debussy’s short-score draft—one of only three extant manuscripts of La Mer—showing the material later orchestrated for sixteen cellos. Image courtesy of Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music
Hokusai’s work as a point of inspiration for Debussy was solidified by the composer’s use of a detail crop of “the Great Wave” on the cover of the 1905 first edition of La Mer published by A. Durand & Fils. Debussy was notorious for personally curating the cover artwork for his scores (he called it his “cover mania”), and in choosing “the Great Wave”—an image already so recognizable throughout Western Europe—Debussy immediately brought a sense of familiarity and exoticism to his new work. Just as Hokusai’s print was on its way to the immortality it enjoys today as a symbol of the finest of nineteenth-century Japanese art, so was Debussy advertising that his new orchestral score would contain the power, elegance, and color of the work represented on its cover. And, in one last act of homage, Debussy placed his name on the score in the exact position where Hokusai’s is located on his own work—floating in the sky, safely above the wave.
Hokusai’s “Great Wave” is now on view in Gallery 231, complementing paintings by the artist and his pupils that are currently on display as part of the exhibition The Flowering of Edo Period Painting: Japanese Masterworks from the Feinberg Collection.
Related Links
Now at the Met: Hokusai’s Iconic “Great Wave”
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Japonisme
Symbolism
Symbolism was a broad artistic movement that encompassed painting, literature, music and theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Post-Impressionist Ideas
Painting associated with the Symbolist movement, such as that by French painter Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and his compatriot Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), was often based on literary themes, myths and legends, but also on personal fantasy and dream. Denis philosophized that the need for realism in art could be downplayed in favour of the effects of line and colour. His paintings were of recognizable subjects – religious scenes, women in forest settings, bathers – but depicted in heightened, unreal colours bounded by flowing, decorative contours.
Gauguin, too, became increasingly dissatisfied with the purely visual emphasis of the Impressionist movement, and tried to introduce a greater degree of symbolism and spirituality into his work. He used strong, contrasting colours and dark outlines around the different elements of his compositions, drawing attention away from the subject depicted and towards the artist’s use of paint. Inspired by Japanese prints, he also developed a new style, coupling bold splashes of bright, unmixed colour with simplified, linear designs. Van Gogh (1853–90), as mentioned in our previous blog, was another leading Post-Impressionist painter who, like Gauguin, used colours symbolically rather than naturalistically. His emotionally charged works, bold simplifications of form and rejection of the Impressionist observational style helped pave the way for Expressionist art.
Art over Reality
A striking tendency within Symbolist works was a move away from narrative in favour of the evocation of a mood or feeling. A common motif in Symbolist painting is a group of figures who do not interact in any straightforward way, whose eyes do not meet and whose gestures and gazes suggest that each one is lost in their own private reverie. The arrangement of a Symbolist composition can thus seem more artificial than truthful. In the works of Gauguin and Denis, this sense of artificiality is heightened by an emphasis on colour and line and on the ways in which different parts of the painting relate to one another within an overall ‘pattern’.
Fauvism
The Symbolist interest in colour as an evocative element in its own right was crucial to the development of the young French painter Henri Matisse (1869–1954).
Luxe, calme et volupté
A dominant figure in the Fauvist movement, Matisse learned a great deal from Gustave Moreau (1826–98), a Symbolist painter with a taste for exotic colouring. After trips to the Mediterranean, Matisse began to employ more vivid colours in his own paintings; using them to create an emotional impact, rather than simply to transcribe nature. He met the artists André Derain (1880–1954) and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) in 1899, and they gradually evolved a style that involved a radical and often savage use of contrasting colours. In the autumn of 1905, an exhibition of their works earned them the name ‘Fauves’ or ‘wild beasts’. This term, coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943), was intended as derogatory, a response to what he saw as a spontaneous and reckless handling of paint and use of colour. Matisse’s painting Luxe, calme et volupté caused a great stir when it was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, and is now seen as one of the key Fauvist works. The piece took its title from a refrain in a poem by Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who was himself a Symbolist. The subject matter was ostensibly serene and restful – a lunch party on the beach – but Matisse’s handling of the paint and treatment of the human figure were expressive and almost violent.
Expression Through Colour
Fauvism was characterized by a primitive style in which intense colours were used, often to create deliberate clashes. This technique completely freed colour from its depictive role, so that it could be truly expressive. Derain produced landscapes full of striking contrasting colours, reds and greens, which appeared to have been painted very freely and quickly, while Vlaminck aimed to express himself instinctively, after the model of Van Gogh. The Fauves generally chose traditional subject matter in their paintings – landscapes, nudes and portraits – which they made modern through their radical treatment. A powerful example of this is Matisse’s 1905 portrait of his wife, whose composition is brought to life by a bold green stripe extending down from her forehead and along her nose.
Expressionism
Personal and Emotive
The move into Expressionism signified a shift towards the subjective experience of a piece of art – paintings became immensely expressive psychological profiles, rather than realistic, objective depictions. Their content involved skewed forms, emotive imagery, and fertile ground for individual interpretation. One early painter associated with the changing focus was James Ensor (1860–1949), whose work marked the transition from Symbolism to Expressionism. He was an early contributor to the Symbolist aesthetic through his use of corpses, grotesque masks and skeletons painted in garish colours, and his painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is widely considered as a precursor to Expressionsim.
The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a leading figure of the Expressionist movement. He studied in Christiania (now Oslo) and travelled in Germany, Italy and France before settling in Oslo. During his time in Paris (1908) he came under the influence of Gauguin and had immense sympathy for Van Gogh due to the bouts of mental illness that both of them suffered. Life, love and death are the themes that he endlessly explored in his paintings, rendered in an Expressionist symbolic style. His use of swirling lines and strident colours emphasize the angst that lies behind his paintings.
Die Brücke
The movement known as Die Brücke (‘the Bridge’) took its inspiration from the work of Van Gogh and Munch, as well as from the art of African cultures. The group was formed in 1905 by the German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and his fellow students Erich Heckel (1883–1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (1884–1976).
The group sought to give direct expression to human feelings, and the name signified the fact that they spanned the art of the past and present, and derived inspiration from a variety of disparate sources. They painted portraits and landscapes in bright colours with large, simplified forms, and were drawn to depictions of nudes in outdoor settings, suggesting a return to nature and to basic origins.
The term ‘Expressionism’ was first used in 1911, primarily in relation to art in France, and then to refer to the painters of Die Brücke, who by 1913 had drifted apart. It would continue to be applied to the work of artists like the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and the German painter Max Beckmann (1884–1950). Beckmann translated his traumatic experience during the First World War into distorted self-portraits and figure scenes, such as his disturbing vision of torture and murder The Night (1918–19). His later paintings depicted circus performers, with himself as clown or king, reflecting the anxiety caused by the social events that surrounded him. The artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918) developed a particularly stark style of Expressionism – distinguished by figures, often naked and usually emaciated – with harsh outlines, filling the canvas with contorted limbs and anguished features. A disciple of Sigmund Freud, Schiele sought to explore the deeper recesses of the human psyche, especially the sexual aspects.
Der Blaue Reiter
The use of painting as a means of communicating personal experience and emotion – a central aim of the Expressionists – was manifested in a more subtle and controlled way in the work of the painters of the Munich-based group Der Blaue Reiter (‘the blue rider’). In an almanac published in 1912, the Blauer Reiter artists, including Franz Marc (1880–1916), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Paul Klee (1879–1940), put forward their vision of new ways of self-expression, including art, design, poetry and music. Kandinsky’s painting, inspired by Fauvism, began to focus less on subject matter than on the lyrical force of colour and the strokes of his brush, seeking to communicate with the viewer in a direct and spontaneous way in the manner of a piece of music. Kandinsky’s works of 1910 to 1914, such as Improvisation No. 23, are considered to be the first abstract paintings of the twentieth century.
Confrontational, personal and emotive, Expressionist paintings and their roots in the ideals brought by Symbolism and Fauvism mark an exciting journey towards Modern Art. If you’re interested in the radical works that helped shape the Expressionist movement, then be sure to take a look at our luxury journals: our selection includes Egon Schiele’s Seated Woman, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and of course, Munch’s iconic Scream (see here).
Links
- The Expressionists were in part responding to the ideals of Impressionism: have a look at our previous blog on the Impressionist movement here.
- Learn more about the Symbolist movement here.
- Read a little more about Munch and The Screamhere.
