"Today Hokusai stands — for Western audiences, and in Asia too — at the pinnacle of “Japanese art.” But if you told the grandees of 19th-century Edo that Hokusai would become the most famous artist in the country’s history, they’d never believe you.
Woodblock prints like his — called Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” and turned out by the thousands in private printing houses — were considered vulgar, commercial images.
How does a single artist — of mass-market pictures, no less — come to embody a national culture?"
Image: Katsushika Hokusai: “Ejiri in Suruga Province.” It’s the 10th image in his renowned cycle “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.”
