Hokusai was, in turns, a romanticist, a classicist and an expressionist; a reverent traditionalist and a pioneering, crowd-pleasing populist. He revolutionized Japanese art by elevating lowly genres, such as landscape and “bird-and-flower pictures,” to high art; and he melded the recessive space of Western perspective with that of traditional Asian art, in which forms farther away are stacked above those closer to the viewer. The supreme master of multiple artistic personalities (30 changes of name; at least 93 changes of address) didn’t, so he tells us, hit his stride until late. On the colophon page of “A Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”, at the age of 75, he confessed that until 70 his drawings were beneath notice. “When I reach 80 I hope to make increasing progress; at 90 I will see the underlying principle of things . . . at 100 I will have achieved divine status as an artist and at 110, every dot and stroke will be alive.”
He only made it to 89 but that bounding animal vitality and leaping line never left him. Perennially hard-up, housed in rough lodgings, “old man crazy to paint” as he signed himself, crouched over the tatami, dressed in a ratty lice-run quilt, helped by his gifted pipe-smoking daughter Eijo, he worked ever harder, faster, deeper. By the age of 80, he had suffered a stroke, the death of two wives, poverty and the intransigence of his grandson, whose debts he was forced to pay. Destitution beckoned. Yet even under these circumstances his vision never fails (nor his eyesight) and his imagination always soared.
Hokusai, who died in 1849, is often thought of as the last genius of the woodblock colour print revolution, a people’s art if ever there was one, which had begun over a century earlier. But his long life stretched all the way back to the middle of the 18th century when the supply of woodblock prints — costing about the price of a double helping of noodles — transformed how art was consumed. It was a genre invented to satisfy the cultural appetite of the biggest city in the world, the million-plus population of Edo (now Tokyo).
Ostensibly the power and the authority of government belonged to the Tokugawa shogun immured in his urban castle. But to keep them out of mischief the nobility were required to stay in Edo, along with their retinues and families. Inevitably, as at Versailles, an emasculated, over-dressed, politically pointless class compensated for its impotence with stupendous conspicuous consumption. That led to the rise of a merchant class to service their ever more extravagant needs. Although the chonin were officially at the bottom of the social hierarchy (in moral status, beneath peasants and artisans), they were the ones who held the moneybags and called the cultural shots and what they wanted above all was entertainment: the courtesans of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter; the star actors of the kabuki; copiously illustrated ripping yarns and epics. Prints from cherrywood blocks with their runs of hundreds and then of thousands — many in eye-popping colour — catered to this visual greed. Like all brilliant entertainment cultures drenched in feel-good fantasy, it gorged on sex and celebrity, sentimental romance and over-the-top dramatics.
Hokusai played his part in this. For all his exalted sense of vocation and Buddhist devotion, he was, in his own way, an outrageous showman with art as his magic. Summoned to perform before the shogun he laid down a thick band of blue, then pulled a live chicken from a basket which hopped around in the paint. Hokusai declared the result “Autumn leaves at Tatsuta river”. In 1804, before an audience come to see a temple sculpture, Hokusai used a hemp broom and 54 litres of ink to make a colossal, 20-metre-long portrait of the founder of Zen Buddhism.
It is hard to think of any artist more indifferent to some notional line (alien, in any case, to Japan) between high art and pop culture. There was nothing he couldn’t or didn’t do: comic book illustration, travel guides, haikus, paintings of sparrows on grains of rice, designs for netsuke, epic battle scenes and military lives, devotional images of holy men, spooks and tigers, raccoon-dog priests and giant flowers.
His adoptive father was a high-end mirror maker to the shogun’s court and Hokusai began fairly quietly, mastering the traditional arts. Like all conscientiously exhaustive shows this one wants us to look again at the screens and scrolls. But Hokusai’s own judgment was right. An elegant hand is evident but nothing compared with the dynamite to come.
In the 1820s he began experimenting with liberated surges of waves and whirlpools, some of them decorative designs for combs and pipes. The great themes make an early appearance: a spectacular woodblock stained with the Prussian Blue that would become a tonal obsession, fishing skiffs racing down heaving waves, the churning water flooding the whole field of vision. He surfed between fine calculation and free impulse. An enigmatic still life features a halved watermelon, set on no visible means of support, the nakiri knife that cut it resting on a finely translucent piece of paper veiling its surface. Above the fruit, lengths of rind like curtain cords hang from a rope. The whole thing is delicate and somehow violent at the same time, appetising and inaccessible, the visual conceit as tantalising as a Donne sonnet.
Old Man Crazy to Paint.
In his 80's Hokusai, portrayed himself as not as some benign patriarch but as a a cheerful, witty and mischievous man, still eager to paint. In what might be his last work he found the power to paint a dragon soaring over Mt. Fuji, it's writhing form wreathed in a cloud of smoke. To the end of his days, Hokusai never ran out of images to paint, only out of time.
