Hokusai, The Great Picture Book of Everything at the British Museum by Molly Hunloke
When I think of legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, I see blue. His most famous work ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ 1831 is to my mind one of the greatest celebrations of the colour blue. The captivating and harmonious hues of the deep sea and pale sky stay with you. Its gigantic waves that form a frame through which we can see Mount Fuji and the empty space above the mountain. As we await the inescapable breaking, the picture becomes filled with tension. In the foreground, a smaller wave forms, a mirror image of Mount Fuji, reflected in the distance, itself miniature by comparison. The fishermen cling to their boats and slide on a sea-come-mountain looking to escape the wave and its destruction. It’s a case of something being so simple yet so effective, so good that it seems almost impossible to achieve. Despite this, The British Museum’s new exhibition “The Great Picture Book of Everything” removes those alluring colours and strips Hokusai to his bare bones. It’s a risk to show his works at their most basic, as they would surely lose some of their magic to the viewer, however the choice couldn’t have worked more in their favour as it illustrates exactly why Hokusai is as beloved and revered as he is.
The exhibition is a story of rediscovery as in June 2019, a set of 103 drawings incorrectly attributed to another artist were put up for sale in Paris. Expert dealer Israel Goldman recognised these as long-lost oeuvres of Hokusai, and the British Museum authority, Timothy Clark immediately requested that the museum acquire them. The ensuing exhibition feels like the equivalent of going to the cinema expecting an action-packed blockbuster, only to be met with a thoughtful slow burn. This is not an insult, as progressively with each work you become attuned to Hokusai’s grandiose vision of the world. It’s one that rewards its visitors greatly
The starring ink drawings were created by Hokusai in the late 1820s for a commissioned visual encyclopaedia that aimed to show literally “everything”. It's a fantastic Borgesian idea, a book that contains all we see in the world and its many inhabitants (real or mythic) from India to China. It’s all the more incredible upon realising that during the Edo period Japan was strictly limited in its contact with the outside world. Since ukiyo-e (the popular genre of Japanese art using woodblock prints) was a commercial enterprise in which the subject was adjusted according to the demand of ordinary people in Edo, Hokusai’s sketches reveal how much people were interested and curious about foreign countries at the time. Hokusai’s information about the surrounding countries and their fables are pleasantly unreliable. Not that it matters when their stories are captured this well. Of course, the book was never finished – hence these masterpieces have been preserved as ink on paper, as they would have been destroyed in the early stages of the printing process when transferring the designs onto woodblocks.
Indian Elephant
Preparatory drawing (hanshita-e) for an illustrated book, mounted on card. Indian elephant. Ink on paper.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
In thinking of Hokusai as a draftsman rather than a colour printmaker, he enters directly into a dialogue with the European tradition in which drawings have been preserved since the Renaissance as the purest effort of the artist’s hand. In this way this collection of Hokusai originals is a real rarity to cherish. Hokusai’s drawings of everything include a sweet Indian elephant, it lowers its head to the ground in comical exhaustion, as if tired from the weight of its tusks and torso. Its skin is wrinkled and old, its girth so great that it makes homunculi of its servants. Hokusai is at his best here, playful and exuberant, his lines are free and fast. These drawings are the result of a rich sketching process. He reproduced them in books he called Hokusai Manga (meaning pictures and used today for comic books/illustrated stories in Japan). The curators picked up on this and couldn’t resist referencing modern manga. For example, ‘A bolt of lightning kills Virūdhaka’ has a ‘ker-pow’ graphic boldness that would be at home in any popular shounen manga today such as One-Piece. Dazzling straight lines of ink radiate from the explosion and the intense dynamism that Hokusai created is even more wondrous due to the silent white circle in the centre of his inky black turbulence. This drawing resembles works by Rubens and Caravaggio however where they needed colour to complete the illusion, Hokusai achieves it without.
At this point you can only realise that Hokusai is doing something incredibly special and ahead of his time. Think of the way he draws water, with small abstract curled lines, repeated in reflections and waterfalls. A humorous drawing of a bear under a waterfall shows its bewildered face at being overwhelmed by these wavy lines. He distils nature right down to its purest essence and then translates that into a stylised shorthand. Hokusai’s work like many in the ukiyo-e tradition have semi-abstract, formalised landscapes that date back to medieval China, but his eye broke with the past for one of a more animated future.
Preparatory drawing (hanshita-e) for an illustrated book, mounted on card. A bolt of lightning strikes Virūḍhaka dead. Ink on paper.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
In his drawings of India, he depicts people running from a sandstorm, heads down, legs leaping impossibly through space. In this way nature is seen as an unstable realm. In one sketch, the eighth-century Buddhist monk Chuanzi Decheng, who worked as a skipper and taught his passengers on the water, pushes another monk into the water while the hapless victim tries to solve a riddle, Hokusai makes feet fly in the air as he slides beneath the waves. According to the story, the monk found relief from his watery shock. Hokusai’s art enlightens us in a similar way. He urges acceptance of the flow of life, enjoy the comedy and endure the tragedy. Is this a Buddhist insight? He belonged to a Buddhist sect, taking his name from its teachings, and his drawings of Buddhist saints and stories have a simple, moving immediacy. This gives a new philosophical depth to the foaming chaos that engulfs those tiny fishing boats in ‘The Great Wave’, which rewards the visitor in all its blue-and-white glory. From his personal meditations on flux and change, Hokusai created prescient art that captures our modern condition. As Karl Marx said of modern life “Everything solid melts in the air”. Hokusai stretched it out.
Bear under a waterfall
Preparatory drawing (hanshita-e) for an illustrated book, mounted on card. Bear under a waterfall. Ink on paper.
© The Trustees of the British Museum