EdmondEdmond dede GoncourtGoncourt HokusaiHokusai Text: after Edmond de Goncourt © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA Layout: Baseline Co Ltd. 33 Ter - 33 Bis Mac Dinh Chi St., Star Building; 6th floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam All rights of adaptation and reproduction reserved for all countries. Except as stated otherwise, the copyright of works reproduced belongs to the photographers who created them. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to establish the right of authorship in certain cases. Any objections or claims should be brought to the attention of the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-78042-996-0 After Edmond de Goncourt Hokusai Contents Foreword 6-7 I. Life of Hokusai 8-39 II. Surimonos, Yellow Books, and Illustrated Novels 40-125 III. Manga and Sketchbooks 126-207 IV. Poetry Albums, Plates, Panels, and Other Works 208-251 Bibliography 252 Glossary 253 List of Illustrations 254-255 6 Foreword okusai’s talent travelled across land ninety volumes; he collaborated on about brilliant courtesans, their silks and and sea to Europe long ago. But his thirty volumes: yellow books and popular embroidery, and the large belt knots spread Hwork, so original, so diverse, and books at first; eastern and western across their chests and stomachs. He so prolific, still remains misunderstood. It is promenades, glimpses of famous places, frightened observers with apparitions from true that, even in the artist’s homeland, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, his most awful and stirring fantastic though he has always been immensely a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, imagination. popular, his work has not been received with tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes the same fervour by the academy and by the and heroines and the thirty-six women poets To understand the art of a very particular, elite as by the Japanese people. Was he not and one hundred poets, with songbooks and distant people, it is not sufficient to learn, reproached, in his own time, for only doing multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of more or less well, their language; it is “vulgar paintings”? Then however, few artists new fashion, books on education, morals, necessary to penetrate their soul, their tastes knew how to delve into the potential of anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches. – one must be the obedient student of this drawing techniques and methods as he did. soul and these tastes. It is, after all, founded What artist can vaunt his ability to draw with Hokusai tried everything, and succeeded. He on love, the profound ecstasy that artists feel his fingernails, his feet, or even his left hand was tireless, multitalented, and brilliant. He in expressing their country. They love it (if right handed) or inverted, with such accumulated drawings upon drawings, passionately, they cherish its beauty, its virtuosity, that it seems to have been drawn in stamps upon stamps, informing himself very clarity, and they try to reproduce its life from the most conventional way? specifically about his compatriots, their the heart. A happy affliction, Hokusai was an work, and their interests, the people in the eminent representative of those who work Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one streets, those in the fields, and on the sea. incessantly. of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of He opened the gates to the walls that hid - Léon Hénnique Blue Fuji, excerpt from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanjurokkei), c. 1830-1832. Horizontal oban, aizuri-e, 25.5 x 35.5 cm. Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris. The Seven Gods of Fortune, 1810. Ink, colour and gold on silk, 67.5 x 82.5 cm. Museo d’Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone, Genoa. 7 8 I. Life of Hokusai okusai was born in 1760 (October through the bookseller’s illustrated books compositions representing a series of actors, or November according to some, and life in images for long months developed in the upright format of the drawings of HMarch according to others). He the young man’s taste and passion for actors by Shunsho, his master. At this time, was born in Edo in the Honjô drawing. Around 1773-74, he worked for a the young Shunro began to show a bit of the neighbourhood, close to the Sumida River woodcutter, and in 1775, under the name great sketch artist who would become the and to the countryside, a neighbourhood to Tetsuro, he engraved the last six pages of a great Hokusai. With perseverance and which the painter was much attached. He novel by Santchô. Thus, he became a relentless work, he continued to draw and to even signed his drawings, for a time, “the woodcutter, which he continued until the age produce, until 1786, compositions bearing peasant from Katsushika”, Katsushika being of eighteen. the signature of Katsukawa Shunro, or the provincial district where the Honjô simply, Shunro. neighbourhood is located. According to the In 1778, Hokusai, then named Tetsuzo, will left by his granddaughter, Shiraï Tati, he abandoned his profession as a woodcutter. In 1789, the young painter, at twenty-nine was the third son of Kawamura Itiroyemon, He was no longer willing to be the years old, was forced to leave Katsukawa’s who, under the name Bunsei, would have interpreter, the translator of another’s talent. studio under peculiar circumstances. As a been an artist of the new profession. Near He was taken by the desire to invent, to matter of fact, Hokusai would keep the odd the age of four, Hokusai, whose first compose, and to give a personal form to his habit of perpetually moving and of never name was Tokitaro, was adopted by creations. He had the ambition to become a living more than one or two months in the Nakajima Isse, mirror designer for the painter. He entered, at the age of eighteen, same place. This departure took place under Tokugawa royal family. the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, where his the following circumstances: Hokusai had budding talent earned him the name of painted a poster of a stamp merchant. The Hokusai, while still a child, became the Katsukawa Shunro. There, he painted actors merchant was so happy with the poster that assistant to a great bookseller in Edo, where and theatre sets in the style of Tsutzumi he had it richly framed and placed in front of while contemplating illustrated books, he Torin and produced many loose-leaf his shop. One day, one of his fellow students carried out his duties as assistant so lazily drawings, called kyoka surimono. The master at the studio, who had studied there longer and disdainfully that he was fired. Paging allowed him to sign, under this name, his than he, passed the shop. He thought the Blue Kongo (Seimen Kongo), 1780-1790. Nishiki-e, 37.3 x 13.7 cm. Honolulu Academy of Arts, donation of James A. Michener, Honolulu. 9 poster was bad and tore it down to save the Tominosuke, took over the house of the book for women covering etiquette. Hokusai honour of the Shunsho studio. A dispute mirror designer Nakajima Isse and led a had two older brothers and a younger sister, ensued between the elder and the younger disorderly life, causing his father many who all died in their childhood. student, following which Hokusai left the problems. His daughter Omiyo became the studio, resolving to work only from his wife of the painter Yanagawa Shighenobu. His life was filled with pitfalls. Thus, near the own inspiration and to become a painter She died shortly after her divorce and after end of 1834, serious problems arose in the independent of the schools that preceded having given birth to a grandson who was a old painter’s life. Hokusai’s daughter Omiyo him. In this country where artists seem to source of tribulation for his grandfather. His married the painter, Yanagawa Shighenobu. change names almost as often as clothes, he second daughter Otetsu was a truly gifted From this marriage came a veritable good- abandoned the signature of Katsukawa to painter who died very young. By his second for-nothing, whose swindles, always paid by take that of Mugura, which means shrub, wife, Hokusai also had a son and two Hokusai, were the cause of his misery during telling the public that the painter bearing this daughters. His second son, Akitiro, was a his last years. It is plausible that, following new name did not belong to any studio. civil servant of the Tokugawa rule and a poet, commitments made by the grandfather to Completely shaking off the yoke of the and became the adopted son of Kase keep his grandson from going to prison, Katsukawa style, the drawings signed Mugura Sakijiuro. He erected Hokusai’s tomb, and commitments that he could not keep, he was are freer and adopt a personal perspective. took on his name. The grandson of Takitiro, forced to leave Edo in secret, to take refuge named Kase Tchojiro, was the schoolyard more than thirty leagues from there in the Hokusai married twice, but the names of his friend of Hayashi, a great collector of Sagami province, in the city of Uraga, hiding two wives are unknown. It is also not known Japanese art. Hokusai’s other daughters were his artistic name under the common name of whether or not his separation from them was Onao, who died in her childhood, and Oyei, Miuraya Hatiyemon. Even upon returning to due to death or divorce. It is certain that the who married a painter named Tomei but Edo, he did not dare, at first, give out his painter lived alone after the age of fifty-two divorced him and lived with her father until address and called himself the “priest- or fifty-three.