Hokusai's drawing of everything
JAPANESE ARTIST’S INDIA WORKS FOCUS ON HIS ‘BUDDHIST INSIGHTS ABOUT LIFE’
ALFRED HAFT, curator of the new Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum, has given Eastern Eye a personal tour of the India related drawings which make up a third of the 103 works on display.
Katsushika Hokusai (October 31, 1760 – May 10, 1849), who is known generally as just Hokusai, remains Japan’s most famous artist. He lived and worked in Edo – modern day Tokyo – and his most celebrated print is Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave. Normally, his drawings were destroyed during the process of turning them into the woodblocks from which the prints were produced. But for some reason, 103 drawings made for The Great Picture Book of Everything were not turned into woodblocks – and so they have survived.
Drawing attention to the India-related drawings, Haft made the point that Hokusai never left Japan, but allowed his imagination to roam across India.
“The India drawings are all along this wall – and they are mostly related to Buddhism,” explained Haft. “They start with Buddhist deities, then the guardian figures of Buddhism, and then Buddha’s disciples, and then narratives related to the Buddhist sutras. There are different aspects of Buddhism here, and it’s all ancient India. Hokusai would never have been to India. He could never have travelled there.”
In part, this was because foreign travel was forbidden. “So, this is all through stories that are told in Japan.”
“Buddhism reached Japan in about the year 500 AD,” continued Haft. “(By the time Hokusai came along) it had already existed for centuries and centuries, and there were many versions of Buddhism coming, first from Korea, and then from China.”
He pointed to one work, A bolt of lightning strikes Virudhaka dead.
Haft said Virudhaka “was said to have eradicated the Shaka clan (followers of Buddha). And in revenge, the Buddha killed him with a bolt of lightning. This is the moment when he’s being struck by lightning and knocked back off his feet.”
Incidentally, among the reviews there was one in the Guardian, by Jonathan Jones, who focused in part on Hokusai’s Indian work: “Hokusai’s drawings of everything include a lovable Indian elephant that could be his answer to Dürer’s rhino. Just like the German artist, he marvels at an exotic beast. It lowers its head to the ground in comic exhaustion, as if tired of the weight of its tusks and trunk. Its skin is wrinkled and ancient, its size so vast it makes homunculi (a representation of a small human being) of its attendants. But where Dürer aimed for science, Hokusai is playful and exuberant. His lines are free and swift.
“In his drawings of India, he depicts people running from a sandstorm, heads down, legs leaping through space. Nature and society, in this vision, are unstable realms. In one sketch, the eighthcentury Buddhist monk Chuanzi Decheng, who worked as a boatman and gave his passengers lessons afloat, pushes another monk into the water as the hapless victim is trying to solve a riddle: Hokusai shows feet flying in the air as he slips under the waves.
“According to the story, monk Jiashan found enlightenment from his watery shock. Hokusai’s art enlightens us in a similar way. He urges us to accept the flow of life, to relish its comedy and endure its tragedy. Is this a Buddhist insight? He belonged to a Buddhist sect, took his name from its teachings, and his drawings of Buddhist saints and stories have a simple, moving immediacy.”
According to the British Museum, “Hokusai’s ambition was to create images of universal appeal, imbued with powerful life force, encompassing the whole range of subjects in worlds both real and imagined. By the time of his death aged 90, he had over 3,000 colour prints, nearly 1,000 surviving paintings, several hundred illustrated books and hundreds of drawings to his name.
“Japan was in virtual lockdown for 220 years. From 1639 to 1859, under the government of the Tokugawa shoguns, people were forbidden to travel abroad. Contacts with the outside world were limited and strictly regulated. Journeys within the country required an official permit. How impressive, then, that Hokusai conceived a grand project to draw, quite simply, everything.
“All 103 pieces of The Great Picture Book of Everything are treated with the customary fantasy, invention and brush skill synonymous with Hokusai’s work.
“However, despite creating the drawings for what was intended to be a book, the project was never completed. So why was it abandoned? This is just one of the many intriguing questions arising from the project. The works produced in the 1820s–40s not only give a unique insight into the artist’s world and work, but also 19th-century Japan. The original brush drawings are accompanied by other works produced during Hokusai’s long career, including his masterpiece The Great Wave.”
In 2020, the British Museum, which has one of the biggest Hokusai collections outside Japan, acquired the 103 paintings. “The existence of these exquisite small drawings had been forgotten. Publically recorded at a Parisian auction in 1948, they are said to have been in a private collection in France before resurfacing in 2019. Purchased thanks to a grant from the Theresia Gerda Buch Bequest and Art Fund, the works are now available to the wider public through Collection online and the exhibition.”
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, said: “Hokusai’s art combines boundless invention, subtle humour and deep humanity. In recent years, the British Museum has explored his vast oeuvre through research and exhibitions.” He thanked Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s mega newspaper group, for sponsoring the exhibition.
Haft said that “Hokusai’s brush-drawings for The Great Picture Book of Everything burst with energy. As the artist himself hoped, each dot and each line almost seems to have a life of its own. This remarkable rediscovery will speak to anyone who loves Japanese art or simply the art of drawing.”
Haft also explained to Eastern Eye how a woodblock is made: “You have an artist’s drawing. That drawing is pasted facedown onto the block. Then the book cutter takes one of these chisels and removes all of the area between the lines. All you’re left with is a block with lines. In that process, the artist’s drawing is destroyed. We add ink, put a blank piece of paper and use that and then pull it off and you get a print. So if all of these (103) drawings had been pasted to the block, they would have been destroyed. But for whatever reason, the book was never published. So Hokusai’s drawings survive.”
As to why The Great Wave is one of the most iconic paintings of all time, Haft offered this view: “It’s a combination of nature and human beings in nature, and the place of Mount Fuji. Also, fame builds on itself, doesn’t it? In the late 1800s Hokusai became almost the representative artist of Japan in Europe, partly because his woodblock prints were so
‘His lines are free and swift’
fantastic in their design. And also because of books like the Hokusai collection of sketches (known as Hokusai manga). Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural, which are amazing. There are hundreds and hundreds of small drawings. He was vastly prolific and vastly inventive. The more that you look at Hokusai, the more he gives to you as an artist.”
Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything runs until January 30, 2022, in Room 90 at the British Museum