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Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave (British Museum)

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He was not only talented but also highly professional: he could draw with any tools, in any scales, using any media (paints, ink, pencils, whatever). Imagine this performance of him: The acquisition comes amid growing conversations about Western museums’ ownership of other cultures’ artworks, especially collections that were acquired through colonialism. Fordham University art historian Asato Ikeda tells Atlas Obscura that the global circulation of Japanese artworks is complex because the country exported artwork as a way to gain soft power around the world.

From the early 19th century Hokusai commenced illustrating yomihon (the extended historical novels that were just coming into fashion). Under their influence, his style began to suffer important and clearly visible changes between 1806 and 1807. His figure work becomes more powerful but increasingly less delicate; there is greater attention to classical or traditional themes (especially of samurai, or warriors, and Chinese subjects) and a turning away from the contemporary Ukiyo-e world. By 1800, Hokusai was further developing his use of ukiyo-e for purposes other than portraiture. He had also adopted the name he would most widely be known by, Katsushika Hokusai, the former name referring to the part of Edo where he was born, the latter meaning 'north studio', in honour of the North Star, symbol of a deity important in his religion of Nichiren Buddhism. [11] That year, he published two collections of landscapes, Famous Sights of the Eastern Capital and Eight Views of Edo (modern Tokyo). He also began to attract students of his own, eventually teaching 50 pupils over the course of his life. [7] The exhibition Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything was open at the British Museum from 30 September 2021 to 30 January 2022. Sponsored by The Asahi Shimbun. One of the most interesting feature of his works is that Hokusai liked to draw series of pictures united by some common theme. These series are funny and diverse, and while every single picture from a series could not look very impressive, the whole row of pictures in one series represents so many different aspects of one subject and just looks perfect esthetically.From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own. [27]

Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of ninety volumes; he collaborated on about thirty volumes: yellow books and popular books at first; eastern and western promenades, glimpses of famous places, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes and heroines and the thirty-six women poets and one hundred poets, with songbooks and multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of new fashion, books on education, morals, anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches. Thompson, Sarah E. (2023). Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence (1sted.). Boston, MA: MFA Boston. p.112. ISBN 978-0-87846-890-4. Hokusai signed his Thirty-Six Views with the name Iitsu, adding for clarification that he was “the former Hokusai”. It was common in Japan, as in China, for artists to adopt different names throughout their careers, marking different stages of life, and perhaps also as a way of refreshing the brand. He adopted the name Hokusai (“North Studio”) in his late 40s, when he became an independent artist, leaving his teaching job and striking out on his own. Brown, Kendall H. (13 August 2007). "Hokusai and His Age: Ukiyo-e Painting, Printmaking and Book Illustration in Late Edo Japan (review)". The Journal of Japanese Studies. 33 (2): 521–525. doi: 10.1353/jjs.2007.0048. ISSN 1549-4721. S2CID 143267375. The most remarkable thing for me was that Hokusai was an amazing person himself: funny, artistic in every sense of the word, energetic, tongue-in-cheek. His personality is especially apparent through his letters.Hokusai's personal life, however, continued to be tumultuous. One of his daughters had died in 1821 and his second wife died in 1828, after which his youngest daughter, Oi, left her husband to return to Hokusai's home. In 1839, a fire in Hokusai's studio destroyed much of his work. At around this point, his grandson began to gamble and behave badly, exhausting the family's finances. Hokusai and his daughter were forced to leave their home and live in a temple. Prints from early in his career show him attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt from European prints brought into Japan by Dutch traders. By the time of Under the Wave, the sense of deep space was far more subtle. The rigid converging lines of European perspective drawing become the gently sloping sides of the sacred mountain. In all other ways it could not have been further from anything being made in Europe at the time. As well as offering the unique chance to study Hokusai's masterful brushwork directly, the show shone a light on the last chapter of the artist's career and life, uncovering a restless talent that burned brightly into his final years.

The show is staged next to one of the world’s greatest prints and drawings collections whose treasures include Michelangelo’s sketches for the Sistine ceiling. It is also where Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros lives (not the print, the original sketch).For example, here a description of one Hokusai's letter. This is a simple letter about routine matters, but just look how Hokusai had written it, with all those little scetches, and humor, and lyricism, and irony, and overall easyness and flamboyancy: such an interesting and intelligent personality! Hua Tuo Operating on the Arm of Guan Yu, by Katsushika Ōi. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk. Photograph: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Kelvin Smith Fund The Asahi Shimbun Company is a longstanding corporate sponsor of the British Museum. The Asahi Shimbun is a Japanese leading newspaper and the company also provides a substantial information service via the internet. The company has a century-long tradition of philanthropic support, notably staging key exhibitions in Japan on art, culture and history from around the world. In addition to supporting Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything, The Asahi Shimbun Company also supports The Asahi Shimbun Displays in Room 3 and is a committed supporter of the British Museum touring exhibition programme in Japan. They are the funder of The Asahi Shimbun Gallery of Amaravati sculpture in Room 33a of the British Museum, and a supporter of the iconic Great Court.

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