Hokusai
by Gian
Carlo Calza, with additional essays by
others
Phaidon Press, New York NY, 2004
520 pp., illus. 200 b/w; 500 col. Paper,
$95.00
ISBN: 0-7148-4457-8.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
ballast@netins.net
As a student, I was introduced to the
work of the leading practitioners of the
Ukiyo-e style of printmaking: Kitagawa
Utamaro (1753-1806), Katsushika Hokusai
(1760-1849), and Ando Hiroshige (1785-1864).
I recall I was awe-stricken then (and
still am) by the work of these three artists,
along with a handful of others. What I
did not know back then is that, a century
earlier, a large number of Western artists
and art collectors in Europe and the U.S.
(Frank Lloyd Wright, for example) had
admired and collected the work of these
artists in a tsunami-like wave
of influence called Japonisme.
Dating from the 1890s, there is a studio
photograph of Henri Toulouse Lautrec dressed
in a kimono and holding a Japanese doll
and a fan. And as virtually everyone knows,
there are Ukiyo-e prints, paintings of
peacocks, vases, shoji screens and other
Japanese artifacts in the backgrounds
of paintings by Edouard Manet, James A.M.
Whistler, and their contemporaries. Van
Gogh repeatedly made attempts to paint
copies of these prints, in the hope that
he might learn about the principles of
composition.
In this book, which is breathtaking just
to hold (How often are we treated to a
volume that provides us with 700 reproductions,
500 of which are in color?), the focus
is primarily on Katsushiki Hokusai, whom
everyone remembers for his ubiquitous
image of "the great wave" (titled
Beneath the Wave of Kanagawa),
a print from a series called Thirty-Six
Views of Mount Fuji (c1834-35). Hokusai
was already world famous 40 years ago,
and a flood of books and studies about
Ukiyo-e, Japonisme, and Hokusai has been
produced in the meantime. Nevertheless,
this book is a welcome addition, surely
because of the excellence of its many
reproductions, but also because it includes
eight very interesting essays (informed
by the latest developments in the practice
of art history) on aspects of the life
and work of Hokusai, with studies of his
youthful work, his Western influences,
his murals, his erotic art, the relation
of art to literature in Japan, his late
works, and his letters. Of particular
value to readers is an annotated list
of works that runs for more than 75 pages,
and includes invaluable details about
the context and interpretative signs for
each of the books reproductions.
Text and reproduction space is given to
Hokusais many caricatures, his "how-to"
diagrams about pictorial composition,
his influence on Western artists, and
his effusive depictions of love-making
(the so-called "spring pictures"
or shunga), as in such fantastic
scenes as The Jeweled Merkin and
Diving Girl Ravished by Octopuses.
Whatever topics chosen by this astonishing
master, he always made powerful images
that so far have survived the dreck of
more than 150 years of art criticismand
will assuredly still be admired far into
the future.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number
3, Spring 2005.)