Japanese Art ASIAN ART 19


interpretations offer a parallel focus on reality, as opposed to that of the poets. Hokusai’s woodblock prints and drawings for the series have greater richness of colour and more wealth of detail than the prints of any other series in this large format, and the collection has become an integral part of Japanese culture and life. Hokusai’s work is both dramatic and uplifting,


yet resonates with


comical, everyday aspects, as well as empathy for the human condition. Te subject matter also


relates to


spiritual and natural worlds, the later work in particular focusing on natural subjects, such as flora and fauna, and landscapes like the wave pictures and his incomparable studies of Mount Fuji. For Hokusai, the volcano held spiritual significance, as a sacred source of water and life, and as a symbol of immortality.


It also


represented a revered source of longevity, with which as we have read, he so identified. He believed ‘in Mt Fuji as an enduring constant, through which it might be possible to transcend the present,’ writes Angus Lockyer, Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS University of London. ‘Mt Fuji not only occupied space in the physical landscape,


it


provided a spiritual anchor in relation to which the world was configured and a viewer could find their place… In the book One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji (3 vols, 1834-49), he explored not only the natural but also the spiritual dimension of the mountain. Here and elsewhere, not least in his fascination with water, he returned repeatedly to the umbilical connection between stillness and movement – between the fixed and eternal truth of Fuji, for example, and the world of unceasing change. By doing so, he sought to reveal how nature itself provides a connection to the divine.’ An earlier publication of around 1831-33 of the print series Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji had helped revive Hokusai’s career after personal challenges in the 1820s. Roger Keyes characterised this first series as ‘the miraculous daily return of colour to the world.’ In 1834, the first volume of One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji was published, ‘one of the greatest books ever’ writes Timothy Clark, curator of the exhibition. ‘Te sacred mountain is shown in a dazzling range of guises and inventive compositions.


His


block-ready drawings were interpreted in unparalleled fine cutting by a team led by the artist’s block cutter of choice, Egawa Tomekichi’ (who, no doubt, charged an appropriate fee). In Hokusai’s very last image of Mount Fuji, painted in the final months of his life, a dragon rises triumphantly from an ominously dark cloud above the sacred mountain. Te dragon is one of the mythological creatures aligned with a variety of deities which coexist with Hokusai’s lifelong faith in Nichiren Buddhism, which as Timothy Clark points out: ‘Served to keep Hokusai spiritually focused and attuned, he believed, to all the manifestations of creation. Many other


powerful spiritual talismans


were mobilised in his late artistic repertoire, vehicles for expressing this unique mix of personal beliefs. Tese included powerful mythical beings such as Shoki, the powerful demon- queller, Zhong Kui,’ who was painted twice in red on silk in 1846 to protect the purchaser from misfortune and disease – especially smallpox. ‘He also painted holy men such as Nichiren (1222-1282); and proud solitary animals, birds and mythical creatures – cormorants and eagles, tigers and dragons, Chinese lions and phoenixes. Tey are all, in a sense, self-portraits of Hokusai who wanted proudly and


painting since childhood. Yet for more than seventy years now, I have not been able to fathom its depths. Over the years, I have attended calligraphy and painting parties, a hundred, maybe a thousand times. Personally, I have got bored with their games and these days I try to avoid them.’ He had been trained in the popular ukiyo-e style, the art of the ‘floating world’, featuring geishas, kabuki actors and poets. But later he eschewed the literary parties and social world in which he had been a leading figure. When he was a child Hokusai was


Kohada Koheiji from One Hundred Ghost Tales, colour woodblock, 1833. Purchase funded by the Teresia Gerda Buch bequest in memory of her parents Rudolph and Julie Buch © Te Trustees of the British Museum.On display to 13 August


adopted by a mirror-maker supplying the court of the shogun of Edo (present-day Tokyo). His was not an easy life. Marrying young, his first wife died in 1785, when he was just 25, leaving him with three children. Ten he married again, his second wife bearing two or three children, and dying in 1828. Te 1820s were a harsh time for the family, of illness and loss. A beloved daughter died in 1821, and then serious gambling debts accrued by an errant grandson fell on Hokusai’s shoulders. After dire spells of poverty, he achieved some success by gaining more patrons, galvanising commissions for hundreds of prints. His third daughter, Eijo, herself an


accomplished artist (art name Oi), left a failed marriage and came to care for her ageing father who was living in very modest accommodation, and also to work alongside him. Timothy Clark suggests the contribution Eijo made to Hokusai’s work in the last three decades of his life: ‘Te prime trait (of her work) is an intricately detailed style that features modelling highlights, shading and darkness in a manner that would have been considered


‘European’ in the


Waves (1845), attributed to Hokusai, with frame paintings completed by Takai Kozan (1806-1883). Two ceiling panels for a festival cart, ink and colour on paulownia wood. Hokusaikan, Obuse, Nagano Prefectural Treasure. On display to 13 August


forcefully to communicate with us. You and I commune,


he insists,


through these extraordinary images.’ Around the age of fifty, he was


struck by lightning, which changed his life completely. In 1812, he left Edo, travelling to Kyoto and other regions. A year later he returned to Edo, and changed his name to Taito, which translates as ‘Star-blessed.’ Tis infers that after the lightning strike, the North Star which had been the principle focus for his


religious


devotion for decades, had saved his life.


In 1820, Hokusai changed his name again to ‘Itsu’, meaning ‘become one with creation’, although he was not to know how troubling and arduous the next decade was to be. His drawing became a voyage of discovery ‘becoming one with his subjects’, echoing his name. In 1834 he


changed his name yet again,


pronouncing himself to be ‘Manji’, meaning ‘everything’, ‘always’, or ‘all.’ Te signature at the back of Volume One of the One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji series was ‘Brush of Manji’, old man crazy to paint, changed from the former Hokusai Itsu,


aged


seventy-five’. Te symbol for Manji is a reverse swastika, an ancient auspicious symbol in India and Buddhism. Its sound means ‘ten thousand things’, or ‘everything.’ Hokusai had always needed to be a


commercial artist, in the sense of making a living. An advertising flier of 1834 included a somewhat jaded comment from him: ‘I have enjoyed


Poppies from Large Flowers, colour woodblock, 1831-1832 © Te Trustees of the British Museum. On display to 13 August


always needed to be a


Hokusai had


commercial artist


contemporary Japanese context’. Hokusai’s work certainly reflects this influence, as we have seen with his use of shading in his commissions for the Dutch East India Company. In the late 1820s Hokusai suffered


a stroke that permanently affected his drawing. ‘Although he recovered and taught himself to draw again, he never regained his former


fluency and


became more dependant on Eijo,’ writes Roger Keyes. In 1834, fire swept through their neighbourhood, and although he and Eijo were able to escape with their lives, tragically the wooden cart containing all Hokusai’s sketches,


supplies and reference


materials was immolated. Tis was the cart


they had dragged from one lodging to another,


father and


Clear day with a southern breeze (‘Red Fuji’) from Tirty-six Views of Mt Fuji, colour woodblock, 1831 © Te Trustees of the British Museum. On display from to 13 August


daughter described as almost beggars. Tat same year, 1834, he went into hiding (senkyo), staying in the coastal town of Uraga for about two years. Timothy Clark clarifies the reasons for this self-imposed exile: ‘One of his children broke the law …, he was trying to avoid the problems arising from the dissolute lifestyle of his grandson … who had already caused chronic problems in the late 1820s. In addition, a picture he drew contained something that infringed public morality; (and) he was overwhelmed with debt.’ Tere was also a devastating crop failure and famine in 1836, which caused thousands of deaths. In such appalling conditions people stopped buying luxury items such as colour prints and illustrated books. Ever responsive to the demands of the market, Hokusai came up with a necessarily limited solution, gathering together all sorts of available paper, on which he painted landscapes, plants, flowers, trees and birds. He added covers to these, making them into folding albums. Since he was already so well known, a few aficionados began to buy them, and in this way he and his family just escaped starvation.


Yet more economic disasters


followed, Hokusai and Eijo moving their rented accommodation – 93 times – by 1848. From autumn to spring he wrapped himself in a lice- ridden quilt. A biographer describes a corner of one of these rooms as being piled with rubbish,


discarded


wrappings of charcoal and food. He records that each morning Hokusai would draw a Chinese lion or lion- dancer on a small piece of paper and throw it out of the window – to ward off evil.


By 1847, two years before Hokusai’s


death, a letter written to a pupil indicates the practical challenges he was facing. He asked for a loan noting ‘because my infirmity has recently returned.’ But still he kept working. In fact that year – 1847 – he was almost as productive as in any other year during his eighties. He and Eijo received financial support from a wealthy saké brewer, Takai Kozan, who was instrumental in securing significant commissions for Hokusai, including two magnificent ceiling panels of wave subjects, which are part of the British Museum exhibition. Other patrons in Edo also acquired works in the artist’s last years. Finally, in 1849, after a short illness, a doctor pronounced that no medicine could help him. Hokusai’s last words were: ‘If heaven will extend my life by 10 more years…’ then after a pause, he added: ‘Ten I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ So what is Hokusai’s heritage? He


was preoccupied with passing on his ‘divine teachings’, as he put it, to his pupils, to craftspeople, and indeed – to the whole world. He published several brush-drawing manuals,


including


Hokusai manga (Hokusai’s sketches) in 15 volumes. Just two years before his death, he finished working on the painting manual Picture Book: Essence of Colouring. In a postscript to Volume One, he expresses his wish to transmit to a wider audience his practical experience accumulated during his lifetime. After specific instructions on the method of preparing certain pigments,


illustrated examples are


given of how to colour about a 100 different motifs, many of them in the paintings of his last years. Tis was his first systematic attempt to teach his painting technique. Surely his very last view of Mount


Fuji, painted in his final months, with the dragon rising above the sacred mountain, is a symbol of Hokusai’s vision of immortality. Actually, he did achieve immortality in a practical sense as a source of inspiration for the Impressionists and many other artists too; and as a catalyst for Japonisme, the cultural movement in Europe galvanised by admiration for the art and design of Japan. In just half a century after his death in 1849, in 1900 a major solo exhibition of his work was staged in Tokyo, and collectors in Japan and then abroad, were actively buying his work. As we have seen, the British Museum bought its first Hokusai print as early as 1860. Hokusai is now viewed as one of


the world’s greatest artists. On the title page of his drawings titled Lives of Famous Generals of Japan and Record of Shoguns of Great Japan, is an inscription. ‘Tese pictures were never made into blocks. Tey are a masterpiece for all ages’. • Hokusai: Beyond the Great Waves runs at the British Museum until 13 August. It closes from 3 to 6 July for a partial change-over of exhibition, due to conservation concerns • More information on the events organised around the exhibition can be found on www.britishmuseum.org • Catalogue available


SUMMER QUARTER 2017 ASIAN ART


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