Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything

Wonderful exhibition at the British Museum of recently discovered drawings but Hokusai for a encyclopaedia.

Drawings by Hokusai are very rare as they were done as a tool in the process of making woodblocks for printing. They would be stuck to the block and used as a guide for cutting the lines and hence destroyed. These drawings ever used and have therefor survived.

There were 163 postcard sized drawings arranged in groups on different subjects. Because the works were so slow it did take a while to go round and this wasn’t helped by the middle aged, including me, having a glasses crisis at the start as they worked out which pair would work best.

My favourite pictures were scenes of everyday life albeit often overseen by a god. There were also fantasy works which verged on manga. The detail was amazing, as in this picture of a peacock, and some had tiny cross hatching to show rough fabrics. Some of the compositions were complex such as a god revealing the appearance of a spirt in a mirror which became a picture within a picture.

Closes 30 January 2021

Review

Guardian


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