Exhibition of the week Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave

British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8181, www.britishmuseum.org). Until 13 August

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) began painting when he was six and came to be regarded as “Japan’s most famous and influential master”, said Rachel CampbellJohnston in The Times. Yet despite his early start and considerable success, he considered everything he created before he reached the age of 70 (he died at 89) to be unworthy of notice. This “entrancing” new exhibition at the British Museum explores the final 30 years of Hokusai’s life, showcasing his “superb draughtsmanship” and “restlessly inquiring talent”. The show brings together more than 200 drawings, paintings and prints, from “eye-giddying eastern panoramas” and “exquisite studies of nature” to still lifes that “turn the ordinary into something rare and strange”. All are imbued with the kind of “magic” that only a “master artist can evoke”. You will be “swept up by the surge of his creative obsession”.

The exhibition offers “one revelatory insight” into Hokusai’s art, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Early on in the show, we learn that he was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company (at the time, virtually the only “direct connection” between Europe and Japan) to create pictures of everyday life in his homeland. Exposure to the Dutch Old Masters greatly influenced Hokusai, and he responded by producing images that were a “stunning new synthesis of two artistic worlds”. The culmination of this cultural cross-pollination came with his “glorious, globally beloved” 1831 masterpiece The Great Wave, which used European perspective combined with traditional Japanese design – and in turn inspired Western artists including Seurat and van Gogh. Yet the show’s “microscopic scholarly obsession” with Hokusai’s old age – with the paintings that came after The Great Wave – is “baffling”: there is little evidence to suggest that he developed a distinct late style. Hokusai was a “world great”. His achievements merit a better, more “atmospheric” exhibition than this one.

Nevertheless, we get a “vivid and intimate sense” of Hokusai as an individual, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. He lived a “rackety” lifestyle and was often “penniless”, moving from one cheap lodgings to the next. Towards the end of his life, he adopted a pseudonym that translates as “Old Man Crazy to Paint”. Among the highlights of his late work are paintings of a feasting demon, depicted with “brisk, gestural brush marks”, and a prayer scene covered with “spattered black ink” that calls to mind abstract expressionism. Despite the odd weak moment, this is a “fascinating” exhibition.