By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; C01
Aspirit floating on the wind, looking ethereal as mist.
A crashing wave whose foam is like a mass of clutching fingers, coming up against a cliff that seems more yielding than it.
An image of a picnic by a waterfall that could almost be a work of angry abstract art.
The most elegant of courtesans, out promenading, rendered in a zigzagging line that fractures her serenity.
The only problem with the works of Hokusai, the great Japanese painter who made all the pieces described above, is that it's too easy to adore every one of them -- and he turned out at least 10,000 images.
Taking in the major Hokusai show that recently opened at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, you go from picture to picture wondering when this artist's inventiveness will fail.
It never does.
From the time of his first works as an independent master, around 1790, nearly up to the moment of his death at 89 in 1849, virtually every image he produced was a miracle of vibrant composition, color, line and texture, as well as being a wonder of artistic observation, both natural and social.
All that must be what gave an earlier edition of this survey, shown last year at the Tokyo National Museum, the highest daily attendance of any exhibition in the world, according to the Art Newspaper's 2005 census -- the highest, in fact, since the annual tally was launched a decade ago.
The Sackler's new version of the Hokusai show, which includes many rare and crucial pictures that aren't allowed to leave Washington, deserves at least equal public adoration.
It certainly doesn't take a Japanese eye to appreciate Hokusai's genius. If there's a failing in his art, it's that it demands so little labor, even from the most insular of Western viewers. Where European greats such as Titian or Cezanne win you over by the challenge they present, Hokusai does all the work for you.
It's easy to imagine that Hokusai simply gets his pictures right , in some culture-transcending way. Could it be that he ties into basic harmonies of picture-making that literally cannot fail to please? His off-kilter compositions, especially, seem to have a lilt and inner energy that almost no one else's do, anywhere.
But maybe the explanation for our pleasure is much more embedded in history than that: Hokusai is at the root of so much of the visual culture we're bathed in today, in East and West, that when we look at him we feel that we've come home. The impressionists we know and love, and after them almost every other movement in modern art, were indebted to Hokusai. Cinematography, advertising art, book design, and every cartoon and comic book you ever looked at as a kid all have flesh built on a skeleton of Hokusai. Maybe Hokusai looks so right only because he helped set up what modern rightness should look like.
Actually, the modern West's relationship with Hokusai is even more complex that that. It seems that Hokusai's own art depended on a Western influence. It has been argued that the European images then penetrating his native land led Hokusai to some of his trademark pictorial conceits.
Night skies rendered a pitch black were almost unknown in Japanese prints before Hokusai, and he uses them to wonderfully dramatic ends in his ghost stories and battle scenes and starlit landscapes. But you have to wonder if he didn't borrow them from European art. Maybe a Jesuit Nativity or two had somehow sneaked into his image bank.
More significantly, the very complex play of near and far, and big and small, that is one of the glories of Hokusai's art seems to depend on his novel, very personal riffs on the deep space of Western perspective.
Hokusai's so-called "Great Wave," one of our most iconic images, is all about a series of receding planes -- one wave behind another, until you reach a tiny Mount Fuji in the far background -- and the strange compositional effects that such shifts of scale permit. Perspective lets a nearby wave threaten an immovable mountain that is miles farther off, and Hokusai took better advantage of this fact than most European artists had. Maybe one reason Hokusai appealed, and appeals, so potently to Western viewers is that he takes stuff we already know and gives it a fresh spin.
The Sackler exhibition makes clear that Hokusai's a much less foreign kind of figure than you'd ever have thought.
I began this review referring to Hokusai as "the great Japanese painter ," and that was no typo. The man now most famous as a printmaker was first and foremost (at least in his own eyes) a master of the brush. Seeing the many paintings in the Sackler show makes it easier to look at him with the same eyes we use for our Old Masters.
The Freer Gallery, the Sackler's neighbor and its sister institution in the Smithsonian's national gallery of Asian art, owns the world's largest collection of Hokusai paintings, and a handful of his hanging scrolls or screens are often out on view. Almost all 50 of them can now be seen in the Sackler show -- and only there, thanks to the conditions governing the century-old gift of Charles Lang Freer, which ban moving his treasures beyond the Freer and Sackler walls. It's the first time since 1960 that the Freer's Hokusais have all been out together.
The paintings don't transform our image of Hokusai's art, the way seeing Rembrandt's paintings would for someone who had only known his etchings.
Hokusai's paintings use many of the same devices that his best prints do -- bold outlines, contrasts between flat tones and busy patterning, the play of empty space against storytelling incident -- but at a bigger scale and with more subtlety. The paintings seem like the apotheosis of everything Hokusai strove for in his wonderful prints, presented for once at the eye-filling scale of a folding screen or hanging scroll.
Two years before he died, the ancient artist filled a large scroll with a stunning dragon -- symbol of the artist's birth year and always a kind of mascot to his art -- which terrorizes a crowd of common folk, while a Buddhist sage floats above them unperturbed. A print might have captured the essentials of the image. But in the painting Hokusai gets to use black splatter, almost Jackson Pollock-style, to capture the explosion of the dragon's soot and smoke, and to keep us amazed at how he makes the drops touch everything except the serene face of his holy man. A painting such as this preserves the traces of an artistic performance in a way that the mechanics of woodblock printing don't allow.
Though with Hokusai, at least, the prints often come stunningly close to the paintings. Hokusai's many thousand prints spread his fame in his homeland, and carried news of him to Europe and America. But maybe they're so good in part because Hokusai preferred to work in paint, and insisted that the craftsmen who carved and inked and printed his best blocks should make them achieve everything his brushes could.
Painter or printmaker, working in established Japanese styles or riffing on another culture's art, the one constant in Hokusai's career is that there was no constant. And that makes him evoke the kind of mad eccentrics and crazed innovators we value so much in the West. He's a figure that we recognize, even if he explodes our most cherished cliches about how Japanese culture worships tradition and is bound by it. Compared with Hokusai's radical refashionings of self and art, Picasso comes off as a tame one-noter.
Hokusai changed his name and signature at least six times over the course of his career, and changed lodgings something like 93 times. (His moves, and some of his name changes too, may have been meant in part to frustrate the attentions of his fans. He wanted his greatness recognized but was said to have no interest in cheap fame or the expensive things that it could help him buy.)
Each name change meant a change in focus in his art. It ranged from exclusive illustrations for poetry clubs (he was a great reader and writer of verse) to the most sophisticated how-to books the art world has ever known, from mass-published landscape prints to a final spate of superb paintings, which he signed Old Man Mad With Images.
Hokusai also published book after book of "random sketches" ( manga ) -- pictures of everything and anything he came across or could imagine. One page shows a top view of some people crossing a square, with improbably large shadows stretching from their feet, as in some Bauhaus photograph. Another shows two farmers fleeing an octopus the size of an elephant, as wild and "random" an image as anything the French surrealists could have dreamed up.
Hokusai's contemporaries dubbed him an Extraordinary Person, and admired his peculiarity -- even if, as a humble printmaker, he barely made it to their lists of top artists.
We too can't help admiring his talent and his strangeness, but let's hope we rate him rather higher.
Hokusai is at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, on the south side of the Mall at 10th Street SW, through May 14. Call 202-633-4880 or visit http://www.asia.si.edu/ .
