Page 117 - September 21 2021 Important Japanese Art Christie's NYC

PROPERTY FROM A SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTION
145 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760-1849)

Kanagawa oki nami ura (Under
the well of the Great Wave off

Kanagawa)

Woodblock print, from the series Fugaku
sanjurokkei (Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji),
signed Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu, published
by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo)
Horizontal oban: 9√ x 14¬ in. (25.1 x 37.1 cm.)

$150,000-200,000

PROVENANCE:
Dr. Walter Wehrli (1901-1977), Riehen, Switzerland

Hokusai was obsessed by wave imagery throughout his long career, but The
Great Wave, his best-known print and an icon of Japanese art and design,
has dazzled generations of Western artists, not to mention collectors. Less
well known is the fact that Hokusai himself took inspiration from the West,
specifically from eighteenth-century Dutch imagery in imported manuals on
perspective and from colleagues who worked in Western style. He became
interested in linear perspective and Western techniques early in his career. The
starting point for Hokusai is his 1805 woodblock print of a tsunami-like wave
cresting ominously over three small cargo boats in a print that predates The
Great Wave by thirty years. Mindful of the latest fashions, he was obviously
imitating a Dutch copperplate engraving, complete with perspective and
simulated roman script. He even imitated a Western frame and wrote the title
horizontally. Shiba Kokan (1747–1818) made etchings as early as the 1780s and
brought the vue d’optique into the Japanese arena. By the early years of the
nineteenth century, Hokusai was translating the effects of copperplate into the
medium of woodblock prints. For a detailed review of this subject, see Timon
Screech, “The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture,”
Archives of Asian Art, vol. 47 (1994).

This experimentation with Western notions appears most obvious in a schematic
study in spatial recession in the Hokusai Manga, in 1815. Hokusai demonstrates
rules of Western linear perspective to create space and depth, with large objects
placed conspicuously in the foreground. Hokusai adopted these principles only
when he wanted, and only if they were meaningful to his design, as in the case
of The Great Wave in 1830.