Katsushika Hokusai Who was he and why was he influential?
Student: Alice Zeng Instructor: Judy Snaydon IDEA 141 - Survery of Design I
Alice Zeng - IDES 141
Katsushika Hokusai holds a place in history as Japan's most famous artist. He was a man who changed his named over thirty times, and left over thirty thousand brilliant designs that marked him as one of the most influential artists of all time. His most well known work, The Great Wave is one of the most recognized works in art history. But more importantly, who was this man, and was he really as brilliant as he was thought to be?
Hokusai was born on the twenty third day of the ninth month of the tenth year of the Horeki era; estimated October or November of 1760, in the Honjo district of Edo. Almost nothing is known about his family but he was said to have been adopted by the Nakajima family and his father was said to have been Nakajima Ise: a mirror maker for the shogunate (Nagata, 1995). His was born with the name Tokitaro, but later changed to Tetsuz, and had interest in drawing and making pictures at an early age, claiming in his autobiography to have been "in the habit of drawing all kinds of things" from the age of six. Little was known of Hokusai's childhood, other than that he worked in his mid-teens as a bookshop assistant, and then later trained for a few short years as a block-cutter.
Hokusai began his training as a print designer at the age of nineteen, where he was made pupil by Katsukawa Shunshō, the then top ranked ukiyo-e artist of the time. Within a year, Hokusai made his first artistic debut and took on the name of Katsukawa Shunrō, a name given to him by his master Shunshō. His earliest prints were done in the style of Shunshō, and also featured the same subject as his master: costumed actors from kabuki theatres. An example includes The Actor Iwai Hanshiro as Kashiku (figure 1); a design celebrated as one where Shunrō made his debut (Nagata, 1995). These early prints were done rather crudely, and most of them only survive today in single copies. By 1780, Hokusai started experimenting with subjects other than actors; he created designs based on folklore, legends, and Chinese themes. Then, in 1791, Hokusai was approached by Edo's foremost publisher, Tsutaya Jūsaburō, who commissioned him to do a series of actor prints. Contrary to previously, this set of prints by Tsutaya were done masterfully, and were the first of Hokusai's designs to receive such treatment. Tsutaya's partnership with Hokusai soon ended; however, this collaboration served useful to Hokusai in the long term, for it was then that he was introduced to several other ukiyo-e artists as well as artists of other traditions; "Poets, writers, and scientists. In short, Edo's cultural elite" (Forrer, 1991).
Come the 1790s, an important decade in the history of Japanese printmaking, where artists of ukiyo-e made new developments in many areas. As people began to indulge in poetry, the more wealthy were commissioning artists for prints in poetry albums or single sheets of poetry, known as surimono. In 1795, Hokusai, who had then recently been expelled from the Katsukawa School, changed his name from Shunrō to Sōri and began frequently providing designs for surimono and kyōka albums. "Hokusai undertook a rapid succession of commissions for these lavish publications where money was no object, ... and had soon established a very special position of himself in the field" (Nagata, 1995). No longer restricted by the Katsukawa School, it was then that Hokusai's style began to diverge from that from the average ukiyo-e artist. Alice Zeng - IDES 141
Summer of 1798, Sōri, who was then head of the Tawaraya school, handed down his head position and launched as an independent artist for the first time, donning the name Hokusai Tokimasa. During this time in the late 1790s, Hokusai produced his first designs featuring a wave; a theme that would later gain him worldwide recognition.(Forrer, 1991) These works included The Threads of the Willow and A Boat in the Great Wave at Oshiokuri (figure 2), both of which employed Western-style techniques and later received much attention as the precursor of The Great Wave off Kanegawa (figure 3) By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hokusai had designed two groups of landscape prints (figure 4 and 5) that were highly influenced by Western art, including use of Western-style framing seen around oil paintings as well as horizontal writing and cast shadows. Following the success of his early landscapes, Hokusai began producing many series of landscapes printed cheaply for larger audiences, and a few years later, provided, for the many novellas of the time, "fantastic designs of great dramatic power and compositional skill" (Forrer, 1991) and was acknowledged as "an artist of great individuality". In 1811, at fifty one years of age, Hokusai assumed the name Taito and began production of a large amount etehon, or art manuals including Hokusai Manga (figure 6). The purpose of these etehon which consisted of quick and simple lessons to drawing was to attract pupils and serve as another form of income; this style of manga inspired the later modern form of japanese comics.
After a continuing rise of fame within the last decade, Hokusai, who had since strayed away from surimono, made his comeback into the world of the poets effortlessly in 1822 (Forrer, 1991). His return coincided with his sixty-first birthday which was his beginning of a new zodiac cycle; to celebrate this, he took on the name of Itsu: "Once year again", and with this name he signed many of his most well known works. (Forrer, 1991) Hokusai had shown during this period a great interest in polychrome print, and consequently produced some of his most outstanding works including The Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji; a series of single landscape prints each which includes a view of Mount Fuji.(Meggs, 2011) This was the first series in the history of ukiyo-e landscapes to have such large-format prints; with a publisher that was willing to invest in the effort, Hokusai finally obtained the chance to explore and elaborate on themes that had fascinated him since youth. (Forrer, 1991) Unlike earlier landscape prints which exaggerated the western-style, Hokusai had achieved a balance between the two styles, making his prints both "appealing to Western eyes, and yet seem very Japanese at the same time" ( Forrer, 1991). The series went on to inspire some other great names of ukiyo-e print including famous landscape printer Utagawa Hiroshige. Within the series is perhaps the most well-known graphic image of all time, The Great Wave Off Kanegawa (figure 3). Traditional Japanese reads from right to left, which meant that Hokusai had designed the wave to "tumble into the viewer's face" (Forrer, 1991); to western viewers who were not predisposed to any specific way to "read" pictures, this would not have affected them the same way it did the Japanese audience in the early nineteenth century.
At the age of 75, Hokusai donned his last artistic pseudonym: Gakyō Rōjin Manji, which he used for the next 15 years. In these year he set aside the field of print and moved on to focusing on brush Alice Zeng - IDES 141 paintings influenced by classical Japanese and Chinese Religion; The Hokusai in this period "had already stepped beyond the confines of ukiyo-e... and was moving in a unique artistic realm of his own" (Nagata 1995). With 1839 came a disaster where a fire destroyed Hokusai's studio and much of his work. By then, younger artists such as Andō Hiroshige were becoming popular, and the career of Hokusai had started to wane.(Web, 2014) But he never stopped painting. Hokusai passed away at the age of 89, on the eighteenth day of the fourth month of the 2nd year of the Kaei era.
As an artist, he was a strict Judge of his own work, and never ceased to explore, experiment, and learn new things. Hokusai writes, in the postscript to his autobiography:
" From fifty on I began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did
before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life,
give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. "
Some of the last words while he was on his death bed were "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."
Katsushika Hokusai was a man who lived entirely for his art, and through his journeys became not only a true artist, but also one of the most influential figures of all time; he was truly, the genius of ukiyo-e.
Alice Zeng - IDES 141
APPENDIX
Figure 1 (left) The Actor Iwai Hanshiro as Kashiku (Kashiku Iwai Hanshiro). Housoban. Private Collection
Figure 2 (above) A Boat in a Great Wave at Oshiokuri (Oshiokuri Hato Tsusen no Zu). Chuban. Tokyo National Museum.
Figure 3 The Great Wave off Kanegawa from Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji. Oban. Private Collection. Alice Zeng - IDES 141
Figure 4 People on Ushigafuchi Street. woodblock. Chuban. Bibliothèque National, Paris
Figure 5 (above) A Coastal View. woodblock. Aiban. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Figure 6 (left) From the e-tehon Hokusai Sketches Volume IX, Katsushika Hokusai Museum of Art
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alice Zeng - IDES 141
Forrer, Matthi, and Robert Williams. Hokusai: Prints and Drawings: :. Munich: Prestel, 1991. Print.
Nagata, Seiji, Hokusai Katsushika, and John Bester. Hokusai: Genius of the Japanese Ukiyo-e. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995. Print.
Tinios, Ellis. Japanese Prints: Ukiyo-e in Edo, 1700 - 1900. London: British Museum, 2010. Print.
Meggs, Philip B., Alston W. Purvis, and Philip B. Meggs. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print.
"Katsushika Hokusai - The Complete Works." Katsushika Hokusai - The Complete Works. N.p., 2002- 2014. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.
"Katsushika Hokusai." - Ukiyo-e Search. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.