Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui. Journey through a Changing Japan

Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin from 19 October 2019 to 16 February 2020

The Pinacoteca Agnelli of Turin presents, from Saturday 19 October 2019 to Sunday 16 February 2020, the extensive exhibition “Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui. Journey through a Changing Japan”.

The exhibition will present works by the two great 19th‐century Masters of the “Floating World”, Katsushika Hokusai (1760‐1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797‐1858), alongside modern prints by Kawase Hasui (1883‐1957), a key member of the shin hanga (“new prints”) movement, who developed the themes and techniques of woodblock colour print throughout the Meiji (1868‐1912) and Taishō (1912‐1926) periods, as well as part of the Shōwa period, right up to the mid‐1950s, when he was named a “living national treasure” in 1956.

The exhibition is curated by Rossella Menegazzo, professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Milan, and Sarah E. Thompson, curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and has been organized by Pinacoteca Agnelli in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and MondoMostre. The project’s main partner is FIAT.

Through a selection of more than 100 extraordinary woodblock color prints by these three masters, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige and Kawase Hasui, the exhibition will take visitors on a journey, divided into 4 thematic sections, through the most evocative places in Japan, both real and imaginary, illustrating the artistic aspect of a country that underwent a huge transformation between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century due to the influence of the West. Thus the Floating World made famous by the first two maestros adapted to the tastes of a society that aspired to European canons, as well as others, as demonstrated by Hasui.

Visitors will experience a comprehensive narrative, starting from the wonder and emotion that artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse‐Lautrec must have felt in their day when faced with the innovation, simplicity and impact of the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the two extraordinary landscape artists who contributed to revolutionising the language of painting in Paris at the end of the 19th century.

They will then witness the evolution of the images of the Floating World transformed in the modern age through Hasui’s skill, nostalgia and innovative technique, seeing his works presented for the first time directly alongside the most important of those by the classic representatives of traditional Japanese art.

Images of the Floating World (ukiyoe), an artistic style that emerged in the 17th century, have been produced by a multitude of artists who through scroll paintings, screens and above all prints, accompany these images to the utmost expression of the genre in the early decades of the 19th century. Hokusai is undoubtedly one of the most elegant exponents of the aesthetic vision of ukiyoe. He was able to depict places and faces, as well as the character and beliefs of society in his day, with strength, dramatism and simplicity. In his scroll paintings, but above all in his woodblock colour prints, the artist was able to lend a new interpretation to the world in which he lived, with free and rapid strokes and the skilful use of colour and in particular of Prussian blue, which had only recently arrived in Japan, drawing both on typical traditional Japanese painting and Western artistic techniques.

The subjects in his prints cover all the areas of knowledge that the exhibition examines extensively, presenting prints depicting the beauty of the nature and landscape of the archipelago, including locations from traditional literature and poetry as well as the great poets that made them famous.

The series of important successes from the ‘30s undoubtedly include those dedicated to famous Japanese waterfalls and bridges, although it was his Thirty‐six views of Mount Fuji that led Hokusai to be fully recognised as a grand maestro by the landscape market. From that moment on, no artist from the Floating World could avoid making reference to his work, and in particular to the print from this series that became an icon of Japanese art: The Great Wave off Kanagawa, known commonly as “The Great Wave”.

Twenty years Hokusai’s junior, Hiroshige became a famous name in the world of ukiyoe shortly after the publication of the Thirty‐six views of Mount Fuji by the maestro thanks to a series in the same horizontal format that illustrated the wide road connecting Edo (the original name of Tokyo) to Kyoto. These are The Fifty‐three Stations of the Tōkaidō, known as “Hōeidō Tōkaidō” from the name of the publisher that led Hiroshige to success. From that moment on, the artist continuously returned to this same subject, producing dozens of different series until the ‘50s. The quality of the illustrations of Japanese landscapes and views, the wealth of the seasonal and atmospheric elements ‐ snow, rain, fog, moonlight ‐ that Hiroshige was able to depict and express in an almost sensory manner earned him the title of “Master of rain and snow”.

For the first time in Italy, the modern and nostalgic work of Kawase Hasui (who despite working with woodblock colour printing drew on Western ideas and techniques) is shown alongside that of the two great classic landscape artists, in order to demonstrate the technical continuity, that at times borders on academicism, and the great changes that emerged following Westernisation and modernisation. The landscapes depicted by Hasui only partially represent those made famous by the ukiyoe (meisho) tradition, instead preferring less well‐known areas of traditional and rural Japan and thus revealing a new aspect of the country. The artist combines the subjects and techniques of traditional Japanese art with the techniques of Western realism, such as perspective and chiaroscuro, creating a new trend defined as shin hanga, new prints. He combines atmospheric sensitivity, a typically Japanese aspect, with a study of light, presenting various weather conditions and the different moments of the day, night scenes, the effects of the rain, the fog and the snow (not unlike Hiroshige) to express the moods of modern man in search of the real Japan.

These images, and in particular the landscapes by Hiroshige, the views by Hokusai and the nostalgic atmosphere of Hasui, become aesthetic points of reference for all the other artists of the time and those who have followed. Both Japanese and Western photographers who have found success in Japan make reference to the colours, framing and subjects of ukiyoe for the pictures they propose to foreigners, confirming the status of those images as the foreign “image of Japan” that conquered and shook the European art world, transforming and revolutionising painting methods.

It is an attraction that still continues today, not only in contemporary graphic forms that are the heirs to this floating art, from manga to anime, from tattoos to the most commercial of objects, but also in the constant reference to the themes and quality of the ukiyoe prints by contemporary Japanese and foreign artists. It is up to the landscape, the famous places (meisho), natural wonders such as waterfalls, rivers and views, right up to the sacred Mount Fuji, as well as to religious buildings such as temples and sanctuaries, to venues such as tea houses, restaurants and taverns, or everyday places like bridges, ferries and piers, and to the customs and traditions of the people of the time that this exhibition focuses on, presenting a comparison of the approach of the three maestros from four different points of view.

From Edo to Tokyo: views of the Oriental Capital uses prints from the most important series of the three artists to focus on a number of the famous places in the area of Edo, the Shogun settlement that developed around the castle from the 17th century when the first Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, chose it the capital, far from Kyoto, still the Imperial city at the time. These include the Nihonbashi bridge, the heart of Edo, the point of departure for the long journey along the Tōkaidō as well as point zero for the measurement of all the distances to the provinces; and the most important temples, places of prayer and entertainment for the people, interpreted by all three maestros, including Hasui in more modern times. Outstanding are the prints of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the last work by Hiroshige, interrupted by his death in 1858, which demonstrates the adoption of a photographic point of view made up of significant close‐ups that are a reflection of the period of openness to the rest of the world and the great sensitivity that these maestros had for light ‐ particularly in the moonlit night scenes ‐ and for the changing seasons.

Journeying along the roads of Japan offers a vision ‐ through a number of significant prints from the most important series by Hokusai and Hiroshige ‐ of famous places and attractions along the Tōkaidō, the ancient Japanese Eastern coastal road, as shown by the bird’s eye view map by Hokusai, or from more distant provinces: stone and suspension bridges, views of Mount Fuji along tree‐lined roads, fords to cross, cliffs and temples, as well as rural houses. Above all, the beauty of each place is represented in the most suitable season: with the snow (Kanbara) under the pouring rain (Shōno), with the red maples or in the light of the full moon in autumn, multiplied by the reflection from the rice fields.

Places of poetry is a section that uses works by Hokusai from his two most important series dedicated to classic Chinese and Japanese poets to offer a vision of the landscape in its literary and idealised (or freely interpreted) meaning: One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse, a horizontally‐developed series, and Mirror of Chinese & Japanese Verses, vertical. These were among the last of Hokusai’s works for the main market before he retired and dedicated himself exclusively to scroll painting; they differ greatly in colour compared to the previous series and bear witness to poetic and literary references in the traditional Japanese visual representation of landscapes.

Views of Fuji completes the exhibition, accompanying the visitor in a sort of pilgrimage to the symbol of Japan, the sacred Mount Fuji, through the famous Thirty‐six views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning, the two iconic works of the series, as well as a number of views from the series of the same name created by Hiroshige more than twenty years later, adopting a Westernised outlook, and a single view by Hasui from 1930 of great strength due to its absolute modernity.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by MondoMostre.