Page 296 - japanese and korean art Utterberg Collection Christie's March 22 2022

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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: 10 x 14√ in. (25.4 x 37.8 cm.)

$300,000-400,000

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.