In the beginning was the wave. The blue and white tsunami, ascending from the left of the composition like a massive claw, descends pitilessly on Mount Fuji – the most august mountain in Japan, turned in Katsushika Hokusai’s vision into a small and vulnerable hillock. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830–31, yet it forms part of a complex global network of art, commerce, and politics. Its intense blue comes from Hokusai’s pioneering use of Prussian Blue ink – a foreign pigment, imported, probably via China, from England or Germany. The wave, from the beginning, stretched beyond Japan. Soon, it would crash over Europe.This week the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, home to the greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan, opens a giant retrospective of the art of Hokusai, showcasing his indispensible woodblock prints of the genre we call ukiyo-e, or ‘images of the floating world’. It’s the second Hokusai retrospective in under a year; last autumn, the wait to see the artist’s two-part mega-show at the Grand Palais in Paris stretched to two hours or more. American and French audiences adore Hokusai – and have for centuries. He is, after all, not only one of the great figures of Japanese art, but a father figure of much of Western modernism. Without Hokusai, there might have been no Impressionism – and the global art world we today take for granted might look very different indeed.
Fine print
Hokusai’s prints didn’t find their way to the West until after the artist’s death in 1849. During his lifetime Japan was still subject to sakoku, the longstanding policy that forbade foreigners from entering and Japanese from leaving, on penalty of death. But in the 1850s, with the arrival of the ‘black ships’ of the American navy under Matthew Perry, Japan gave up its isolationist policies – and officers and diplomats, then artists and collectors, discovered Japanese woodblock printing. In Japan, Hokusai was seen as vulgar, beneath the consideration of the imperial literati. In the West, his delineation of space with color and line, rather than via one-point perspective, would have revolutionary impact.
Both the style and the subject matter of ukiyo-e prints appealed to young artists like Félix Bracquemond, one of the first French artists to be seduced by Japan. Yet the Japanese prints traveling to the West in the first years after Perry were contemporary artworks, rather than the slightly earlier masterpieces of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro. Many of the prints that arrived were used as wrapping paper for commercial goods. Everything changed on 1 April, 1867, when the Exposition Universelle opened on the Champ de Mars, the massive Paris marching grounds that now lies in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It featured, for the first time, a Japanese pavilion – and its showcase of ukiyo-e prints revealed the depth of Japanese printmaking to French artists for the first time.
by Jason Farago, BBC | Read more:
Image: Katsushika Hokusai 
