Setting aside accomplishments and technical qualifications, it is a truism that a great artist must create at least one indelible image to secure his or her legacy. For Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) this crowning event didn’t occur until the Japanese icon was in his seventies, when the blockbuster print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji was published. But if it is for two ukiyo-e woodblock prints from that masterwork—Under the Wave of Kanagawa (known as The Great Wave) and A Mild Breeze on a Fine Day (Red Fuji)—that the artist is chiefly remembered, they make little more than a passing moment in Hokusai’s decades-long aesthetic and spiritual engagement with the volcano that looms over Tokyo.
The latest from art-book editor Kyoko Wada, Hokusai’s Fuji (Thames and Hudson, $35), re-focuses attention on the diversity of the artist’s Fuji-related output—a nifty idea, since the artist’s promiscuous experimentation with form, technique, and genre serve to capsulize mid-Edo Japan, a period when influences Eastern, Western, past, and present were coming to bear. Throughout his career, Hokusai devoted considerable time to full-color woodblock prints, a format that came into its own as the period of economic growth fostered by the Tokugawa shogunate gave rise to higher rates of literacy, as well as a merchant class with the will and means to patronize the arts. In genre pictures such as bijanga (tributes to the beautiful ways of women) and meisho-e (depictions of famous places) from the first half of his life, Mount Fuji appears not in the main role but as a supporting actor, a visual cliché recognizable from centuries of Japanese art. The compressed space and the bushy-tail bark texture of trees show the influence of Chinese painting schools, but by the early 1800s, when Hokusai was in his fifties, he had begun increasingly to fall under the spell of the West. Curiously styled prints like his Tokyo nocturne Nihonbashi, whose aggressive hatching contrasts sharply with the limpid color-field work traditionally found in Japanese art, reflect Hokusai’s and his countrymen’s fascination with the Dutch and French copperplate engravings trickling into the country via the port of Dejima. Such scenes cannot yet be called landscape art in the Western sense, but as censorship in the early eighteenth century restricted artists’ access to the traditional gossipy subject matter of ukiyo-e, Hokusai swept away the human clutter crowding his pictures to meditate on the mountain. In Shichirigahama Beach, Sagami Province, the first plate from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the printer’s liberal use of recently imported “Berlin blue” pigment in various tints and shades gives form to a rarified landscape of trees and clouds and jutting peak. Hokusai seems to have gotten a bead on the mood of charged ambivalence that was then the exclusive domain of Western landscape art, a hunch that lesser-known brush-and-ink studies of the same period like Mount Fuji and Enoshima, whose remote fishing village and mountain are almost swallowed in an expanse of negative space and Claudian atmosphere, confirm.
Only a few years later the artist would begin to use a seal modeled on the Japanese character for one hundred, also understood to mean “eternity.” “Perhaps Hokusai was already looking towards a universal realm,” Kyoko speculates in the book’s final chapter, “beyond Edo, Japan, and even beyond time, by transcending all specific schools, ukiyo-e artists, or existing frameworks for pictorial expression.” The book’s final image, painted on silk in the year of the artist’s death, shows a dragon soaring upward past Mount Fuji. It is difficult not to see it as a portrait of Hokusai himself, the volcano pointing his way to the empyrean.
