Hokusai created thousands of woodcut prints based on the traditions, legends, and lives of his countrymen. The artist blended Western perspective with traditional Eastern techniques to reinvent the art of the Japanese print. His timeless images achieved their greatest popularity in the West and influenced generations of artists, most notably Van Gogh, Monet, and Degas. Published in the 1830s, The Great Wave is Hokusai's most familiar vision of Mt. Fuji. This compilation, which depicts the sacred mountain from many angles and in all seasons, is a must for all lovers of Japanese art and woodblock prints of the floating world.
Hokusai created thousands of woodcut prints based on the traditions, legends, and lives of his countrymen. The artist blended Western perspective with traditional Eastern techniques to reinvent the art of the Japanese print. His timeless images achieved their greatest popularity in the West and influenced generations of artists, most notably Van Gogh, Monet, and Degas. Published in the 1830s, The Great Wave is Hokusai's most familiar vision of Mt. Fuji. This compilation, which depicts the sacred mountain from many angles and in all seasons, is a must for all lovers of Japanese art and woodblock prints of the floating world.
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Overview
Hokusai created thousands of woodcut prints based on the traditions, legends, and lives of his countrymen. The artist blended Western perspective with traditional Eastern techniques to reinvent the art of the Japanese print. His timeless images achieved their greatest popularity in the West and influenced generations of artists, most notably Van Gogh, Monet, and Degas. Published in the 1830s, The Great Wave is Hokusai's most familiar vision of Mt. Fuji. This compilation, which depicts the sacred mountain from many angles and in all seasons, is a must for all lovers of Japanese art and woodblock prints of the floating world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486315997 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 46 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter, and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) created thousands of woodcut prints based on the traditions, legends, and lives of his countrymen. His timeless images achieved their greatest popularity in the West and influenced generations of artists, most notably Van Gogh, Monet, and Degas.
Read an Excerpt
Views of Mt. Fuji
By Katsushika Hokusai
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-31599-7
INTRODUCTION
In the years 1830 to 1833, Hokusai was at the height of his powers. An old but incredibly productive man of over seventy, he had behind him a series of achievements in a variety of mediums and styles, culminating in the superb series of colour-prints, the "Thirty-six Views of Fuji", the "Waterfalls", the "Bridges" and the "Flowers", now recently completed. At this peak, he turned as to a monumental labour of love and homage, to the preparation of a book of designs devoted to the Peerless Mountain. From the first, it was conceived consciously as his master-work: it was to be a final expression of faith such as another might have dedicated to a religious cause It was to sum up his artistic philosophy and practice: it was to express the whole gamut of his experience, from the meanness of his fellow creatures toiling for a handful of rice, to the sublimity of the great mountain stark against the empty sky.
To appreciate the greatness of Hokusai's book, we must know something of the veneration, amounting to idolatry, of this mountain peak among the Japanese; and something, too, of the art of the picture book in Japan.
The bald geographical and geological facts about Fuji are briefly stated. A quiescent volcano, last active in 1707/8, it is 12393 feet at Ken-ga-mine, the highest point of the crater wall at the summit, and is thus the highest mountain in Japan. In circumference, at the base, it is one hundred miles. In shape, seen from afar, it approximates to a cone, but the sides are not equal, and each makes a sweeping catenary curve forming, with the broken apex, an assymetrical pattern so utterly Japanese in spirit that one feels that if Fuji did not exist in actual fact, Japanese artists would have created it. Arising as it does, isolated, in the midst of a broad plain, it is a dominant feature of the landscape of many surrounding districts, and a popular map is the Fuji-mi Jusanshu, the "Thirteen Provinces whence Fuji can be viewed". The ascent of Fuji, not particularly arduous or dangerous in the summer months, is a pilgrimage that every good Japanese makes at least once during his life-time.
Fuji, in fact, has from earliest times been nothing less than an obsession with the Japanese. Other countries have natural features universally known within and outside their borders—the Niagara Falls and the Table Mountain are instances that come to mind—but none of these features has a significance to the inhabitants of those countries comparable to that of Fuji to the Japanese. It is more than simply a symbol of the homeland, such as the Dome of St. Pauls is to Londoners, or the Eiffel Tower to Parisians; it is more than the abode of the Gods, as Olympus was to the ancient Greeks. It signifies the long history and the aspirations of the race; it is a token of all the scenic beauty of the land, and by inference, represents the impressibility of the people to nature. Among national symbols, perhaps the Statue of Liberty comes nearest to this summing up of a people's ideals, but that was man-made to represent those ideals.
Some of the first poems in the native language show that already, in the 8th century, Fuji was revered with superstitious awe. In the Nara anthology called Manyoshu, the "Collection of One Thousand Leaves", is an anonymous poem that contains these lines:
"No words may tell of it, no name know I that is fit for it,
But a wondrous deity it surely is!
... It is the peace giver, it is the god, it is the treasure. On the peak of Fuji, in the land of Suruga,
I never weary of gazing."
The earliest scrolls of the true Japanese style of painting, the Yamato-e of the 12th and 13th centuries, contain memorable depictions of Fuji, isolated in grandeur, or a backdrop to tempestuous events in the foreground. It is drawn with studied reverence, girt with clouds that crown it as, in western painting, a nimbus marks the saintly head. In verse and scroll, it almost seems that as the new nation became aware of itself, Fuji was chosen as an emblem of artistic, as well as national, independence.
In the field of the decorative arts, especially in metalwork and lacquer, Fuji recurs again and again, on the large ink-box and on the exquisitely-made inro, on sword-guard and stilettohaft—whether for writer or warrior, Fuji was equally appropriate. It is a favourite subject in landscape netsuke, accompanied sometimes by Saigyo, the mediaeval poet, looking towards it for inspiration, or by Yoritomo, leader of the Minamoto clan in the 12th century, shoivn boar-hunting with Nitta, his retainer, at the foot of the mountain. As one of the Three Lucky Things, (Fuji, Falcon and Egg-plant, to dream of which was a mark of good-fortune), Fuji often figured on surimono, the New Year's Greeting Cards. It is a frequent motif in brocade pattern; in bonzai (dwarf gardens): in porcelain decoration; in the decoration of practically everything the Japanese ever used or wore. It is like a signature tune denoting "Japan". It may be difficult to account for this predominant place in the people's hearts, but then we are, after all, far from accounting for a number of their customs and for many of the traits of their character—the idolatry of the Emperor, for example, or that strange duality of personality which permits a callousness to human suffering and a hypersensitiveness to the fine arts to co-habit in the same individual. It is a fact we must accept.
Hokusai was a sort of self-styled encyclopoedist of Japanese life and custom. Birth, inclination and artistic gifts predestined him to such a function. He was steeped in the lore of his country, in its traditions, its poetry, the associations of each place-name. Like Shakespeare, he makes us wonder how one so low-born and so apparently ill-educated, could have attained to so universal a knowledge. Hardly any aspect of life in the diverse provinces that make up Japan escaped his notice, and it is not surprising that the form of Fuji appears as a leit-motif in his work from the very first book-illustrations of the 1780's to the last drawings of his old age, nearly severity years later.
In this period he was concerned in the production of upwards of two hundred books. To some, like the poetry albums of his early years, he contributed only a single design in company with leading contemporaries like Eishi, Utamaro and Shigemasa. Most publications, however, called for a large number of drawings. The kibyoshi or "yellow-backs", also of his early years, were cheap-jack novelettes of three to five small booklets, with pictures helping out the text as in a strip-cartoon. More serious literature, such as Bakin's interminably long novels, ran usually to multiples of five volumes, each with five or six illustrations, and when they extended, as in one case, to ninety volumes, they represented a vast output of designs. But these works of illustratoin, powerful as they are and of great value in elucidating the texts, are of secondary importance to the albums and books in which Hokusai had a free hand. This type of book, consisting of a bound series of prints, in monochrome or colour, with a minimum of text, is uniquely Japanese. It could be a set of landscapes, or a fashion magazine; a pictorial anthology of verse, or an advertisement, with portraits, of the ladies to be hired at the Yoshiwara, or licensed quarter, a serious manual of instruction for art students, or a collection of slapstick caricatures. Hokusai's ehon, "picture books", are among the most remarkable. There are disconnected sketches brought together in book form by admiring pupils, of which the immortal Manga is the best known; there are books of warriors and derring-do; books of drawing-instruction; and above all, albums of landscape prints, such as the "Range upon Range of Mountains" of 1803, the "Panoramic Views along Both Banks of the Sumida River" of 1804/5; and the "One Hundred Views of Fuji", the last and finest work of this kind.
When we handle a Japanese picture-book, the very feel of it, the strangeness of its format, even the opening from left to right instead of right to left as in our own books, has a certain appeal. It is light, it has soft covers, it opens easily, using the whole "spread" of the book for some prints with a frank acceptance of the gap for the binding in the centre. When to these qualities we add the texture of the mulberry-bark paper, silky yet strong; the vivacity of the brush-drawn calligraphy, (moveable type was only very rarely used); and the beauty of the wood-block illustrations, we begin to realize that part of our pleasure is due to the book being a hand-made article throughout, in the production of which papermaker, book-binder, publisher, artist, block-cutter and printer all joined forces. For once we may perhaps allow ourselves a superlative generalisation: Japanese illustrated books, at their finest, are the most beautiful in the world.
The "One Hundred Views of Fuji" is printed in mono-chrome, but so exquisitely that the gradations of the black and grey of the ink give the effect of a wide range of colour. The principal engraver, Egawa Tomekichi, was one whom Hokusai especially admired for his skill. Although any detailed bibliographical consideration of the book would be out of place here, it must be emphasized that only the first edition of each of the first and second volumes is printed in this superfine way and does complete justice to the splendid designs. The first edition of volume 1, which appeared in 1834, bears a title-label with decoratives lines at the top resembling a feather, and this has led it to be called the "Falcon's Feather" edition. The covers of this edition are salmon pink and embossed by gauffrage, or blind printing, with a landscape design. The colophon bears the proud inscription "75 years old, formerly Hokusai I-itsu, now changing his name to the Old Man About Drawing, Manji" with a red seal depicting a stylised Fuji in white reserve. The second volume is dated 1835, and has similarly distinguishing label and covers, signature and seal. The third volume, for a reason never explained, was not published until after a long interval in fact, on the evidence of the introduction, (for the volume is undated), not until Hokusai "had outlived his 90th year". This can only mean in 1849, when, by Japanese computation, which makes a man a year old at birth, Hokusai was ninety: the year of his death. By that time, the standard of printing had fallen below the extreme refinement of the first and second volumes. At the issue of the third volume, the first and second volumes were reprinted, and there is a marked difference in the impressions of the 1834/5 editions and the 1849.
As to the title of the work, an obvious question arises. Why One Hundred Views of Fuji? Why, in the earlier colour-printed set of broadsheets, Thirty-six Views? It is one of the more curious foibles of the Japanese to adopt a sort of numerical classification for things as diverse as ancient poets, natural landscape features, and events in the lives of the saints. There are the Six Jewel Rivers; the Eight Views of Lake Omi; the Seven Scenes from the Life of Ono no Komachi, the Poettess; the Twenty-four Examples of Filial Piety; the Seven Gods of Good Luck; the Eight Taoist Immortals; and so on. We are not immune from a similar sort of reliance on the magic of numbers—there are the Seven Wonders of the World and the Nine Worthies, for instance—but with the Japanese (and the Chinese for that matter) these groupings are much more common. The establishment of the canon, the fixing of the runic number, is invariably traced back to a remote antiquity. The orthodox number of Views of Fuji became fixed at either thirty-six or one hundred, but nobody seems to know when or how. It is rather a coincidence that two of the numerical categories most frequently referred to are the 36 Poets of Antiquity, and the 100 Poems by 100 Poets, and it may be that the Views of Fuji were linked to these; it would be quite in keeping with the national flair for associating incompatibles—they personified the 53 Stations of the Tokaido with portraits of the reigning beauties, and thought nothing of turning the Eight Views of Lake Biwa into Eight Views of Elegant Boudoirs.
The Preface to the first volume of Hokusai's book refers to the "100 Chapters on Fuji" by Keichu, and the "100 Sections on Fuji", by Toko, and might have gone on, more appositely, to draw attention to another artist's "One Hundred Views". These are by Minsetsu, a minor artist of the classical school, and appeared in a block-printed book published in 1785, when Hokusai was a young man of 25. It is more likely that the book was known to him, and may even have been remembered by him when he came to compile his own "One Hundred Views". But a comparison, if one can be made at all between the two versions, would only be to point out the orthodoxy of Minsetsu's unimaginative prints and the extreme originality of Hokusai's.
For Hokusai's "Views" are nothing more or less than the pictorial setting of an obsession. There is a quiet opening to the first volume, a picture of the Sublime Goddess, Bringer of Fruit and Flowers, serving as a prologue that hints at the genesis of the mountain from the chaos and mists of antiquity. The next picture shows the mythical creation of the mountain, an event supposed to have taken place in the year corresponding to B.C. 285. From then on, the theme having been announced, Hokusai uses it like the great composer he was, bringing it into the foreground with sonorous brass, or veiling it with contrapuntal themes that all but disguise it, digressing only very infrequently with a reference to legend or history. Fuji straddles right across the page, or recedes to the far distance; it is white against a dark sky, or black under sunset clouds; it is seen through the stems of bamboos, or through the strips of dyed cloth hanging on poles to dry; it is even seen as a reflection or shadow in lake or sea, or, with typical Hokusai whimsicality, upside down in the wine-cup of an old tippler.
The technique is almost that of the motion picture. We are switched from viewpoint to viewpoint, with a deliberate choice of "angle", that, for all the wealth of incident, focusses our attention on the mountain, so insists on its inevitability that when it is not prominent, our eyes search for it. Everything revolves around that immortalised cone of volcanic rock. The mood and the tempo change as swiftly as the viewpoint, from the sublime to the trivial, from the slow pace of peasants trudging under heavy loads, to the dash of a great wave breaking in a crest of foam. The element of surprise, the trick of astounding us, is another of Hokusai's stratagems. There is often something quite unexpected, imprevu, about the way Fuji is introduced into the picture. It is glimpsed through the mesh of a fisherman's net, or beneath the arch of a bridge, faintly through a downpour of rain, or framed in a hole in a rock. The excitement of the Japanese in catching sight of the mountain is conveyed a number of times—best of all, perhaps, in the picture entitled "The first kakemono (hanging-picture) of Fuji", where an old man flings out his hands in ecstasy at the vision of Fuji through an opened window. Occasionally, one almost hears the impressario's roll of drums, the clap of thunder that precedes a stupendous feat of showmanship: most powerful of these, I think, is the troupe-l'oeil of Fuji and a village at its foot caught in a blinding flash of lightning during a gale.
One could continue to dwell on the devices employed by Hokusai to gain his effects, to hold our attention, to vary the composition, and other technical considerations, but it is doubtful if it would bring us any nearer to accounting for the affection and the admiration we have for this collection of prints. In many respects, Hokusai was a Japanese of the Japanese, and some of the pictures in his book have overtones for his countrymen that must fail to register with us. His artistic style is a curious amalgam of native, of Chinese, and even of European elements, a quite personal blend that the connoisseurs of his own country have often pronounced distasteful, or praised only when they found that it was admired by the west. The appeal to us of his artistry is more immediate in the colourprints, where the daring of the designs and the patterning of arbitrary colour dictated by the wood-block medium are seen to anticipate certain trends of modern art, especially the artist's right to subjugate natural forms and not to be dominated by them. In the "One Hundred Views" there are occasional successes of this kind but on the whole we are more conscious of the virility of the line and the subtlety of the washes expressing vast vistas so economically—stylistic features of the purely oriental kind that in another artist might have awakened only a faint response in us, enured as we are to western styles and techniques. No: it is not style alone, nor a capacity for skilful draughtsmanship, nor a genius for the misen-page—all of which Hokusai shared with a number of his fellow-countrymen—that gives the "One Hundred Views" its universal acceptance: ultimately, it is the human element, the feeling that these are peopled landscapes, that beneath this sublime peak and upon its slopes, men and women, mostly of a humble, near-to-earth order, are living out their lives. It is what we call the "common touch", which Hokusai, like Rembrandt, unknowingly possessed. The men and women are not quite in our likeness—they have an anatomy and a physiognomy devised as much by Hokusai as by Mother Nature—but the fishermen, coopers, tea-pickers, builders, boatmen, signwriters, umbrella-makers, the revellers, the pilgrims, the travellers, all are recognisably fellow human-beings, enlisting our sympathy or raising our laughter.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Part I,Introduction,
Preface to the First Volume,
Preface to the Second Volume,
Preface to the Third Volume,
Description of Fujisan,
Part II,
Introduction,