The world of art is as subject to fads and fashions as clothes, restaurants, popular songs, and interior design. Certainly the Japanese master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was well aware of changing trends, experiencing a great many ups and downs in a career that spanned more than three quarters of a century. Now, 140 years after his death, a new surge in interest in Hokusai is evinced by several stunning new publications of his work in English, as well as a series of exhibitions and facsimile publications in Japan.
Hokusai. The very name suggests overwhelming energy, vigor, humor, invention, intensity, fecundity, and a search for the essential geometry of all living things. There is no Western artist to compare. Perhaps Picasso comes closest in his remarkable range of styles and talents, his energy throughout a long career, and his ability to find the human drama in every aspect of the world around him. But Picasso was a prodigy, gifted form his teens. Hokusai, in contrast, had to work harder than any of his contemporaries to achieve success, and if he had died at the age for forty, he would be remembered only as a prolific but minor artist. It was not until the final two of his nine decades that he became the master whom we revere today.
Studies of such a multifaceted artist as Hokusai have always divided into two kinds: Overall biographies and specialized publications focusing upon one aspect of his work. For some time the English-speaking public has been well served in both regards by Jack Hillier. His Hokusai (London: Phaedon Press, 1955) has been the standard overall biography, and his Hokusai Drawings (London: Phaedon Press, 1966) and The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (London: Sotheby Parke Burnet, 1980) continue to be the most useful books on two of Hokusai's major artistic fields. Another aspect of Hokusai's work, his volumes of published drawing called Manga, were charmingly described and illustrated in James A. Michener's compilation The Hokusai Sketchbooks (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1958). One of Japan's best-known scholars, Muneshige Narazaki, has had two volumes published in English for the popular series Masterworks of Ukiyoi-e. They are Hokusai: The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Hokusai: Sketches and Paintings (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1968 land 1969). In Japanese, the major publication has been Katsushika Hokusai by Ozaki Shudo (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1967). Along with an excellent Japanese text and fine reproductions, it contains seven pages of English summary.
While admirers of Hokusai have felt reasonably content with these publications, to our delight three major new books, and the promise of more to come, offer us new windows into the world of this great artist. The most recent overall study of Hokusai is also homage to the first major study of the artist, written in French by Edmond de Goncourt in 1896. Matthi Forrer's new book, simply titled in both English and French editions as Hokusai (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1988), alternates his own new text with that of Goncourt, written nearly a century ago. This sophisticated integration of two books into one makes us aware how thoroughly Goncourt was able to study Hokusai's art, and yet how far scholarship has advanced since his day. Forrer's copiously illustrated volume also serves as a reminder of the intense interest in Japanese prints that transformed the painting of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and how this foreign interest helped awaken the Japanese to the greatness of their own popular
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