In the March 24 Weekend section, Eve Zibart's review of the "Hokusai" exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery said that the artist (1760-1849) lived "through the era of Japan's first exposure to European culture." He actually lived between the two periods of official interchange between Europeans and Japanese, when outsiders were banned by the shogun. However, there was a flourishing black market in Western art, particularly engravings and reproductions, and he was an avid collector. Many of Hokusai's works refer and respond to Western conventions and techniques, as is noted in the exhibit.
The Insatiable 'Hokusai'
Friday, March 24, 2006; Page WE43
To walk through the "Hokusai" exhibition at the Sackler Gallery is to feel quite suddenly how vast and yet minute the world is.
In sketches, woodblock prints, scroll paintings, screens, notebooks, illustrated poetry, storybooks and nature studies, this extraordinary artist -- who filled nearly all his 90 years with intensely conceived and emotionally generous art -- prompts us to see both with eye and soul all the great vistas, intimate landscapes, animals, fish, flowers, muses, Buddhas, ladies, laborers, jokesters and monks the universe has to offer. Surrealist, ultra-realist, caricaturist, portraitist, teacher, poet, observer, aesthete, ironist, empath and optimist, Hokusai left behind a body of work stunning to contemplate and humbling to behold. If it has become commonplace to call such exhibits "breathtaking," then "Hokusai" is heart-stopping.
  "Hokusai" features works by the legendary Japanese artist, including this Escher-like painting. (Tokyo National Museum) |
Katsushika Hokusai, who lived from 1760 to 1849, and who later claimed to have begun drawing seriously at age 6, was almost unbelievably prolific, an insatiable and restless lover of life. Intensely intrigued by technique, he mastered brushwork, pen and ink, tinting and silk painting, suiting each subject to its best medium. Living though the era of Japan's first exposure to European culture and destined in turn to become a huge influence on Western artists and designers, Hokusai hoped to live to 100 when, he believed, he would achieve a sort of revelation or spiritual transformation. He would be semi-divine, and at age 110, he believed, "every dot and every stroke [in my art] will be as though alive."
Throughout his career, he changed his signature and professional name as evidence of his faith, his artistic influences and his increasing age ("The old man mad with pictures," for instance). "Hokusai" itself refers to the North Star, an allusion to his determination to follow his creative impulse wherever it led and without bending to convention.
Like Michelangelo, he was fascinated by muscularity and motion; like Audubon, he saw God in the meanest creature. Though he sometimes gibed at the fashions of the foppish gentry, he had a love of beauty -- beneath their elaborate robes, many of his female subjects bend and turn like a classical Venus rising from her bath -- and startling emotional insight: A woman holds her cat close to her cheek in a moment of suspended uncertainty, her longing for affection visible through the folds of her ornate robe. Even more poignant is a scroll painting of a courtesan, bare foot visible (itself an erotic signal), holding the neck of her kimono closed in her teeth and carrying a fold of paper for the toilet; in this age of commercials, it might so easily seem comic but for the obvious loneliness and exhaustion in the bend of her neck.
The exhibit, which marks the centenary of Charles Lang Freer's gift of his art collection to the nation, includes more than 180 pieces and is a rare opportunity to view Freer's unequaled collection of Hokusai works. The 41 Hokusai paintings donated by Freer, which were collected about the turn of the 20th century and have not been displayed since 1960, are the most stunning revelation. (Because of restrictions in Freer's bequest, the exhibit will not be lent to any museum other than the Sackler.)
On one floor, there are several rooms that track Hokusai's chronological development -- or rather, his various interests, for even his earliest creations are masterful -- in woodblock prints, sketchbooks and studies. The sketchbooks alone are marvels, pages filled with multiple views of laborers, cranes, monks, mountains and animals. Many of the images, such as the cranes, were created with a single brush stroke. Hokusai's books were so popular that, though intended for other artists, they were published to huge success and frequently reprinted.
From frame to frame, his work mesmerizes. A classically flat-perspective historical scene pitting the ronin samurai of a murdered nobleman attacking the home of his enemy teems with fury. An almost Escher-like intertwining of hens and roosters speaks of harmony, and yet the noise and humor of the meeting is almost audible. The throat of a bullfinch on a branch of a weeping cherry barely blushes, the same color as the flowers' edges. A painting of more than 100 kinds of crabs and crustaceans is both anatomically precise and inescapably humorous, thanks to the pair of jet-bead eyes each creature turns to the viewer. And the elephant who, curled on its side, bears the figure of the bodhisattva Fugen, in the pose of a prostitute, is wrinkled and bony as a water buffalo.
"The Great Wave," as Hokusai's most famous image is known, and "The Red Fuji" presage the development of graphic printmaking, the one with its grasping, clawing foam, into which a fishing boat has been enveloped, the other with its ripples of cloud that acknowledge the metaphors of Western art. In the twilight, beneath a black and starlit sky, fishermen haul their nets against the pull of a ribbon river.
The paintings, which are grouped thematically into literary illustrations, animal studies, mythology and humanity, are on a lower floor. Here is the carp, fluid as a prima ballerina; a tiger soaring through snowy air like a spirit guide; and rivers flecked with red maple leaves, moonlight, broken grasses.
Nowhere is there condescension or censure. The poorest laborers, though sometimes comically limned, are dignified by their comprehension of natural beauty and by that very ability to survive exacting lives through humor. And those deities whose power Hokusai invokes are as potent as Frazetta heroes, knotted with furious, flame-like sinews.
One 47-foot-long scroll, only partially unrolled, may have been a kind of demonstration or study book for his students (although it almost suggests a sort of horoscope or kitchen god's incantation): an herb-stuffed fish, a warthog, a half-peeled turnip, a lotus root and a dried lotus flower, a bowl of rice with chrysanthemum greens, water chestnuts, a daikon radish and carp, an eel, a catfish, a cat looking smugly at a butterfly that may be approaching too closely, a monk, a fox and a leaf-strewn riverbank follow one after another.
A series of 12 large paintings of animals and plants represents the months of the year and include such beauties as a pair of iris lifting up to where a cuckoo soars, tortoises swimming amid soft underwater ferns, a branch of flowering cherry whose crook dips into the river where pale fish sway, a circle of swans, a pair of ducks and a strangely sweet trio of puppies huddled under a tent in winter.
And, oh, the cherry blossoms, the flowering plums, drifting like snow and moonlight and gauze and poetry . . . Even in this season, when Japan's great gift of the city's cherry trees is at its most beautiful, it is hard not to believe that Freer's gift, the work of Japan's finest artist, is far greater.
"Hokusai" is an exhibit that requires some patience, partly because the conventions of Japanese art, its costuming and allusions, are not familiar, making captions invaluable. To protect the art, the light in some rooms is low, the captions are printed on a neutral background and the art has been covered with glass, so even simple reading glasses might be advisable to see the details of line and tint, some of which is very delicate. Thirty or so of the pieces will be rotated at the end of the month to preserve them from light and wear damage.
HOKUSAI Through May 14 at the Arthur M. Sackler Galley, 10th Street and Independence Avenue SW (Metro: Smithsonian). 202-633-1000. Open daily 10-5:30. Free.
