Page 158 - 2021 March 16th Japanese and Korean Art, Christie's New York City

138 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), late 1831
Horizontal oban: 9¬ x 14º in. (24.4 x 36.2 cm.)

$120,000-180,000

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.