IThe catalogue to the British Museum exhibition
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave
(
Thames & Hudson, 352pp, £40/$40) is edited by Timothy Clark. It consists of “short discussions of individual pictures and five essays about Hokusai’s life and work in the final three decades of his long life; of his thought, his technique in woodblock prints and illustrated books; his historical period and social networks.”

Hokusai (1760-1849) influenced his younger rival Hiroshige (1797-1858).  Both were prolific artists, travelled widely (only possible on foot or horseback), had two wives and three children.  One of Hokusai’s daughters was a disciple and talented artist; another beloved daughter died; and a delinquent grandson burdened him with gambling debts.  At the age of 50 he was struck by lightning, which knocked him into a field.  In his late 60s he suffered a stroke that permanently affected his drawing.  When he was 80 a fire destroyed all the art in his house.  During his 70-year career, Hokusai created 3,000 colour prints and illustrations for over 200 books with unerring intelligence, imagination and ingenuity.  

Hokusai’s subjects include the samurai, farmer, artisan and merchant, who represent the rigid class structure that values leisure over labor; work, travel, landscapes and seascapes; animals, birds and fish; poets, wrestlers and war; brothels and sex; religion and mythology.  His work allows the viewer to enter the exotic and appealing world of early 19th-century preindustrial Japan.

More could be added to the editor’s brief comments on the best prints.  Of
Ejiri, Suruga Province
, the editor writes, “The road snakes through the marsh on raised dykes.  The strong wind strips leaves from the bent trees, sending a stream of papers and a lost hat flying up into the sky.”  Two rows of men, clutching their round bamboo hats, walking-sticks and puffed-up bags, struggle against the powerful wind that blows their papers into the air like birds in flight.  In a splash of colour a bright red wooden box, perhaps a roadside shrine, appears in the center. 

Viewing Sunset over Ryogoku Bridge
portrays a wavy streaked river, a ferry boat with crowded passengers, fishing boats in the distance and a high wooden bridge leading to a village on the distant shore.  “The woman doing the washing in her boat is contrasted with the man in the ferry who idly trails his hand towel in the water.”  The blue conical Mount Fuji appears like a godlike spectator of man’s futile endeavors.

Suspension Bridge
: the editor writes, “A couple returning home from their work in the mountains cross a suspension bridge with no handrail, the man carrying a load of brushwood on his back and his wife with a small sack on her head.”  The narrow bridge, above a steep chasm and three flying birds, bends under the heavy weight and burdens of two tightrope walkers whose heads almost touch the low clouds.  The rope suspension hangs between the tall Prussian-blue mountain and two tiny deer grazing on top of a cliff.  

Carp in Waterfall
:  Like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, one crisscrossed black carp, surging in the deluge and partly obscured by it, has managed to overcome the powerful force and get halfway up.  The lower big-eyed, wide-finned fish holds steadily under the torrent.  This static carp seems to hesitate before the perhaps impossible challenge—a symbol of man’s struggle to survive.

Poet Li Bo
: The famous, moustached and heavily robed Chinese poet, perilously balanced on the edge of a high cliff, faces a surging stylized waterfall that looks like a frozen solid sheet of ice.  The poet is deep in contemplation, as if trying to absorb the torrential steel-like energy.  The editor quotes Li Bo’s poem: “As seen afar, the waterfall hangs before the river. / The current leaps and tumbles sheer for three thousand feet.”  But neither the river nor the tumbling waterfall appear in this print.

Poet Fujiwara no Yoshitaka
:  After a night of love the poet, wearing a stunning blue robe decorated with white patterns, relaxes on a pale wooden veranda and under a broad red roof.  For inspiration he looks at the calm sea that subtly changes from deep blue, to greyish blue, greyish green, pale yellow and soft red.  Three companions recline behind the poet, and behind them two naked men bathe and frolic in a hot tub.  Swirls of stylized steam emerge from the sides of the tub,wind into the sky and contrast with the flat sea.  The seated figures on the porch are framed between the two trails of steam, and between the red roof above them and the pointed blue roof on the house below, which matches the blue robes and blue water.  In a poignant poem, the poet’s life takes on new meaning when he encounters his ideal woman and falls in love: “I would have been willing / to lose the old life / to meet you just once. / Now, having met you, / I want it to last forever” (my translation).

 

The subjects of
The Third Princess and Her Cat
were described in Lady Murasaki’s
Tale of Genji
.  The woman’s oval face, narrow eyes, long thin nose and tiny mouth recall the features of some African statues and Modigliani’s portraits.  Magnificently dressed in layers of precious robes spread out, swirling around the floor and partly seen through the bamboo screen, the princess leans to the left, drops her head and forms a graceful curve.  Her white-and-black spotted kitten, held on a long black leash, crawls across the wooden planks and through the railing, and looks down at its unseen prey below.  The white cherry blossoms in the lower right, which show that the season is spring, match the white kitten, the white folds in the heavy red kimono of the princess and the white face of the frail, poised, elegant idealised beauty.

Night Attack on the Horikawa Palace
:  Three figures, portrayed in a tall column placed against a tan background, prepare for a battle.  Standing at the top is the famous and victorious red-robed chieftain; kneeling in the middle is his faithful black-and-red robed lover, who tilts her head in homage and hands him his long curved golden sword; crouching at the bottom, with dark face and grey robes, is his loyal priest and ally, grimacing like a warrior in a Kurosawa film. “From bottom to top the figures suggest ascending nobility of character.”

The Great Wave
, Hokusai’s most popular print, has been endlessly reproduced throughout the world.  The editor notes, “Spray falls from the tentacles of the wave like snow on to the peak.  The whole picture is orchestrated to pay homage to the steadfastness of the sacred mountain [as against the vulnerability of man].  The swift boats delivering fish to the market in Edo head directly into the great storm wave.”  The personified, powerful, angry, massive, swirling, curved, threatening blue and white-capped wave, echoed in its giant clawlike foamed white edges, seems like a great beast created by a tsunami.  As Robert Frost wrote, “There would be more than ocean-water broken, / Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.”

Twenty bare-skulled oarsmen in three surging boats look like men in a frantic Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race performed on a roller coaster.  The coiled, hooked tentacles and splintering whirlpools of the wave (a surfer’s dream and nightmare) reach toward the sky before crashing down into the sea, sucking in and smashing the three frail and doomed barques that sway and tilt beneath it.  The curve of the wave expresses the power of nature that crushes the helpless men thrust into the destructive typhoon.  The brave but doomed crews recall Captain Ahab’s fatal struggle with Moby Dick, but unlike Ishmael no one will survive to tell the tale.  

By contrast to the furious wave, the calm resplendent blue and white-capped Mount Fuji, which echoes the smaller foreground wave, represents peace amid destruction and rests calmly in the distant center.  Hokusai mass-produced as many as 8,000 inexpensive impressions: “For little more than the price of a double-helping of noodles, anyone in Edo could purchase his own impression of
The Great Wave.
”

The French author Edmond de Goncourt wrote an early appreciation in his book
Hokusai
(1896): “He brought into his work the entire humanity of his country in a reality that escapes from the noble requirements of traditional Japanese painting.  He was passionate about his art, to the point of madness, and sometimes signed his productions ‘the drawing madman.’ or ‘old man crazy to paint.’ ”  Ford Madox Ford, when writing his last book
The March of Literature
(1938), echoed the artist and called himself “an old man mad about writing.”  Like Titian and Picasso, Hokusai worked impressively into old age.  His last words, aged 90, were: “If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.”  

Jeffrey Meyers taught in Japan in 1965-66, and has published
Painting and the Novel
,
Impressionist Quartet
, biographies of
Wyndham Lewis
and
Modigliani
, and a book on the Canadian realist painter
Alex Colville
.  

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