Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave

Lovely exhibition at the British Museum looking at the life and work of the Japanese print maker, Hokusai, just one of the names he used during his career.

The star of the show was obviously “The Great Wave” but it put this famous and much mimicked picture into the context of the rest of this work. The picture was published in 1831 when he was in his early 70s.

He trained as a woodblock maker in his teens and in his 40s and 50s became well known as an illustrator for fiction, working on a series of popular books called Strange Tales and there were lovely examples of this work.

The wave itself was one of a series 36 views of Mount Fuji using European deep perspective. In Eastern art perspective was shown by distant objects being placed high up in the frame but in a series of prints he did for the British East India Company he started to experiment with Western artists ideas using a low vanishing point and light and shade to give depth. I was also fascinated to see he imported Prussian Blue from Europe. I found it ironic that artists like Van Gogh and the Impressionists were being influenced by Japanese prints when the great Hokusai was importing ideas from Europe.

The picture itself is beautiful and I’d never seen that the mountain appeared in the arch formed by the water. It was nice to see it shown with the other views to give it context. There were 8000 impressions made of it which sold for about the cost of two bowls of noodles.

In the later works I loved  some beautiful flower prints of brightly coloured works against blue or dark backgrounds, very like Van Gogh’s picture of blossom against sky. The precision of the colour in the prints is stunning. Also a festival cart with ceiling panels decorated by him including some western images such as a cherub.

Closes on 13 August 2017

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