SYMHC Classics: Hokusai

We're revisiting our 2015 episode on Hokusai, who lived during a time when there was not a lot of contact between Japan and the West. But even so, he drew some influence form Western art, and Western art was greatly influenced by his own work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Not long ago, we talked about
Murasaki Shikibu and in passing we mentioned Japan's Edo period
and the work of Katsushika Hokusai. That episode came out
way back in so it seemed like a good time
to share it again, especially since it also connects to
our fairly recent episode on the mysteries of the color Blue.

(00:23):
And we kick off this episode with a talk about
a trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to
see the contents of a time capsule that we're temporarily
on display there, as well as an exhibition on Hokusi
that was running at the time. Of course, that visit
which Tracy made to the m f A was also
back in those things you're no longer on display. Please
don't go and ask to see them. They will look

(00:44):
at you confusedly. Yeah, there's uh, there's plenty of other
stuff to see at the m f A should you
want to go, but not those particular things anyway, And enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome

(01:07):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry,
So that's time. I went to the Museum of Fine
Art Boston and saw that time capsule that had been
pulled out from the cornerstone of the Old State House.
I had three things on my to do list on
that trip. There was that time capsule. There was Gustav
Klimps Adam and Eve, which was on loan from a

(01:29):
museum in Vienna. And there was a huge exhibition of
artwork by the Japanese artist best known as Katsushika Hokusai.
And in addition to that to do list, I wound
up also seeing lots of Leonardo da Vinci sketches and
some World War One propaganda posters, and a whole series
of photos inspired by the earthquake and tsunami that struck

(01:51):
Japan in So just to give you a sense of
how many amazing things there are at the Museum of
Fine Art in Boston. Uh, if you've never heard of Hokusa,
you will probably still recognize his most famous work, which
is Under the Wave off Kinda Gaua, which is better
known as the Great Wave. This is the one that
shows three little boats in the shadow of an enormous

(02:15):
menacing frothing wave with Mount Fuji shown in the background.
Hokus I lived during a time when there was not
a lot of contact between Japan and the West, but
even so he drew some influence from Western art, and
then Western art was later greatly influenced by his own
work and from others from the time period when he lived.

(02:36):
His career was also extremely long and diverse, and his
work was just prolific. This collection of work at the
m f A in Boston is huge, and the temporary
exhibition of it is so big that we actually had
to take a break from looking at it and go
eat and come back because it's enormous. Uh. The m
f A actually describes its collection of Japanese art as

(02:56):
the largest and finest outside of Japan. So hokosa is
who we are going to talk about today. Hokosa I
was born in Edo, which is now Tokyo, in seventeen
sixty and he lived during Japan's Edo Period also called
the Tokugawa period. The Edo period lasted for about two
hundred fifty years starting in the early sixteen hundreds. Hoka

(03:17):
Size work grew directly from a number of social changes
that took place in Japan during this period. The period
before the Tokugawa came to power was known as the
Sengoku period, and it was also nicknamed the Warring States
period because it was marked with war, unrest, and strife.
The Tokugawa took several steps to try to secure their

(03:39):
power and prevent a return to the state of perpetual
conflict once they were in power. The first was that
the Tokugawa Shoguns banned Christianity and expelled all Europeans from
Japan except for the Dutch, and the Dutch were exempt
because they hadn't tried to convert the Japanese, but even
Dutch contact with Japan was limited it, as was Japan's

(04:01):
contact with its nearer neighbors of China and Korea. The
second was that the Tokugawa required the feudal lords, who
were known as the damio who ruled Japan's provinces in
their stead, to maintain two residences. One was an Edo
and the other was back in their home province. The
daimio were expected to travel back and forth between these

(04:23):
residences while their families stayed in Edo full time. The
residences of the daimio were expected to be lavish and opulent,
and when they traveled back and forth between their home
provinces and Edo, they were expected to do so at
great luxury and with a large retinue of mostly unmarried samurai.

(04:43):
There was an ulterior motive to all this. The Tokugawa
and Edo always had an eye on the damio's families,
which basically functioned as a tacit threat to their safety
to keep the daimio in line. And in addition to
all of that, uh they had to spend so much
money on these multiple residences and the travel back and

(05:04):
forth that the daimio could never afford to raise an
army to challenge the Tokugawa's power. So it was sort
of a way to keep everybody in line. And as
a sign note, this plan was not entirely successful in
a group of ronan or masterless samurai tried to orchestrate
a coup against the Tokugawa. Even though the Daimio were

(05:26):
employing quite a lot of samurai, there were many others
who were effectively out of work once the Warring States
period was over. However, these requirements that were placed on
the daimio affected life for other people in Japan as well.
Number one, people were traveling a lot. Even though Japan
wasn't having much contact with the rest of the world,

(05:46):
travel within its own borders really became its own industry.
Five major highways connected Eddo to the rest of Japan,
and these were aligned with places to rest, eat, arranged transportation,
buy things, and make religious observances. The most famous of
these was the Tokaido Road also called the Eastern Sea Road,

(06:08):
and this connected Edo to Kyoto before going on to Osaka.
And although the daimyo traveled these roads at great expense,
ordinary people were also using them. Society under the Tokugawa
became divided into four classes. There were warriors, farmers, artisans,
and merchants. And even though the merchants were technically at
the bottom of the pile since they just sold the

(06:29):
work of other people rather than creating work of their own,
a lot of the merchants became quite rich. Japan became
home to a thriving middle class thanks to all of
these different industries and the increased commerce that was coming
with people traveling everywhere and maintaining multiple residences in Edo,
visiting daimyo and their large retinues of samurai tipped the

(06:52):
gender balance within the city, spawning another industry, one of
pleasure and entertainment to cater to their interests. This whole
world of fashion, luxury, and amusement became known as the
floating world or okio. The newly wealthy merchants and artisans
had access to the floating world as well. It also
spawned a whole school of art called u k o

(07:14):
A or Pictures of a Floating World. And these were
basically pictures, paintings and wood black prints of things like
pleasure districts, courtisign's, geisha tea houses, kabuki actors, that sort
of thing, and they were hugely popular among the growing
middle class. It was in this school of art that
Hokuside trained as an artist, and we're going to talk

(07:35):
about how that training came about after a brief word
from a sponsor. So to return to Hokusai specifically, we
know a lot more about his professional life than about
his personal life. There's a fair amount of contradiction when

(07:56):
it comes to the details of his biography, thanks to
it's a and the fact that a lot of knowledge
of it that survives today is kind of glean from
a wide range of sources, like introductions he wrote to
his own books, and notes from other artists that were
compiled well after his death. He was born Kawamura Tokitaro.

(08:18):
He had an uncle named Nakajima isay who was a
mirror polisher. This was actually a prestigious position because mirrors
at the time were mainly made from bronze rather than
silvered glass. Mirror polishing required a special and exact set
of skills, and hokus Eye uncle had no heir to
train to take over this position, so hokusis uncle adopted him,

(08:39):
and later on reflections, refractions, lenses, and optical effects would
become a huge part of hokusize work. Hokus I started
writing and drawing at the age of six, and these
are two skills that are really connected quite closely in
Japanese culture thanks to the use of kanji in written language.
Later on, hokus I would also say that anyone who

(09:01):
could write could also draw, and he would create these
paintings that were basically built up from a series of
written words. It's unclear whether hokus I just didn't want
to be a mirror polisher, or whether he didn't get
along with his uncle, or whether he correctly concluded that
bronze mirrors were going to go out of fashion, but regardless,

(09:21):
as a teen he did not pursue his uncle's line
of work. He worked instead for a publisher and a
lending library, and he worked as a block carver, making
blocks for woodblock prints, even though he demonstrated a talent
for art at a very young age, and his uncle's
position meant he could get access to the showguns official
painters hocus as formal education in art didn't actually start

(09:43):
until he was nineteen. He joined the studio of Katsukawa
Centual a uk O a artist in seventeen seventy nine.
Katsukawa some shows specialty was woodblock prints of kabuki actors.
While working in Katsukawa is Stu to You, hokus I
signed his Prince shun rule, which is a combination of

(10:04):
a character from his teacher's name plus an additional character,
and this was traditionally how art students would sign their
work with like a character from their teacher's name plus
another character of their own, choosing hokus I worked with
the Katsukawa School until seventeen ninety four, and these years
are known as hokus Chunro period. During this period, he

(10:25):
also illustrated about fifty books, and he made woodblock prints
of a lot of subjects that were common in the
u k o A school. Although little of his painting
work survives from this period, it's clear that he studied
painting at the Katsukawa school as well. Hokus I also
started experimenting with Western style vanishing point perspectives in his
work during this time, and that's a theme that would

(10:46):
resurface later on. Sun Show died in seventeen ninety two,
and two years later, for reasons that aren't completely clear,
hokus I left the school and stopped using the name
shun Roll. He found another position now that Tawaria family
hired him to train their son, whose father, an artist,
had died. Hokus I was allowed to use the name Suli,

(11:09):
which was the name of the deceased father, until his
son was ready to assume his role as heir and
leader of the family's school. The Tawaria family apparently had
quite a bit of wealth and status, so while he
was with them, hokus I had access to the best paints, inks,
and other art materials, and for about four years he

(11:29):
produced a large number of privately commissioned prints known as surimono,
as well as a number of paintings. Working with privately
commissioned prince gave Hokusi some artistic freedoms he didn't have before.
He didn't need to worry about sticking with less expensive
printing inks because the print runs themselves were much smaller
and everything was being paid for by his patrons. A

(11:52):
lot of these works were commissioned by poetry clubs as
accompaniment for playful works of poetry. Because of this work
in private commissions, Hokusai developed friendships with many prominent poets
and other well known figures, and he seems to have
been quite financially prosperous during his story period as well.
It was in the spring of when the Tawaria Air

(12:14):
assumed control of the family school that Hokosa gave up
on the soul Re name and began working under the
name Hokusai Tokimasa. He would continue to change his name
from time to time after this point, which is a
pretty common practice among artists in the Edo period, but
the name Hokusai is the one that he really became
recognized for He became so well known under that name

(12:35):
that even as he used other names, he would often
add Saki no Hokusai or the former Hokusai to his works.
It's like the artists formerly known as Prince Um. After
leaving the Tawaraia family, he also experimented with a lot
of forms of art besides the standard Prince paintings and
book illustrations that had made up a large portion of

(12:57):
his work before. He made a board game depicting a
journey from Edo to several pilgrimage sites and back again.
He also created puzzles and a deck of playing cards
based on the tail of Genji. He produced books of
his own, including manuals on how to draw, and he
published sketch books known as manga. He also made lots
and lots of dioramas. These were intricate illustrations that were

(13:19):
printed on one flat sheet or maybe two. You really
needed a lot of them, and they were meant to
be carefully cut out and then assembled, with the cut
pieces standing up vertically, which would create a three dimensional scene.
Many of these were extremely complex and detailed. One of
the prints in the m f A's exhibition is one
of these uncut and working from a copy of it,

(13:40):
curators tried to create an assembled version to kind of
accompany it so you could see the flat one as
it was printed and the assembled one. It took them
multiple tries to get it to do. We mentioned before
that we don't know a great deal about hokusais personal life,
but what we do know is that he experienced a
series of tragedy starting around eight twenty. His oldest daughter

(14:01):
had married one of his students and they divorced in
hokus I became very very ill, and a year later
his wife died. His grandson, son of the daughter who
had divorced, did something. The details of what exactly it
was are unclear, but whatever it was led Hokusai into
some really huge financial problems. His third daughter, on the

(14:23):
other hand, was named Katsushika Oi, and she became a
wonderful artist on her own, and it's possible that she
helped her father with some of his work. I actually
originally wanted to do the episode on her because she
seems to have been quite a character who loved sake
quite a lot, and she would sometimes substitute one of
the characters in her name, for one meaning drunk instead
when she signed her artwork. But unfortunately, yeah, we know

(14:47):
even less about her and have way less of a
body of work to drop round to talk about uh
Katsushika Oi than we do about her father. And it's
possible that all these tragedies and the lack of money
that followed were what spurred hokus I into making his
most famous work of art, Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji.
As its name suggests, there are thirty six prints each

(15:08):
featuring Mount Fuji in some way, and the Great Wave
is one of those. The series fit in well with
a trend that was rushing through Japan at that point,
which was sets of full sized landscape prints that worked
together as a series. Another of these series that you
may have heard of is Hero She Gay's fifty three
Stations of the Tokaido Road. Hokusai himself also did a

(15:32):
series on the stations of the Tokaido Road, but Hero
she Gays became more famous than than Hoku Size did.
Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji was also inspired by
Prussian Blue ink, which was newly available in Japan and
known as Berlin Blue there. It led to a huge
demand for artwork that used the color blue, and while

(15:53):
the public clamored for azerier or prints done entirely in
shades of blue, hokus I started using the blue paint
for the outlines on his landscapes, which had traditionally been black,
and he also used them for prints of birds and flowers.
Hocus I also used lots of blue in his work
in general during this craze for blue, and some of
the prints in the thirty six Views of Mount Fuji

(16:14):
in their first edition printing, are almost entirely blue. As
people became less enamored with the color blue, The same
blocks would then be used to print new editions of
these works, but with more colors in them, so they
weren't quite so overwhelmingly blue. After the success of the
thirty six Views of Mount Fuji, hokus I created just

(16:34):
an enormous number of landscape prints, but around eighteen thirty
four eighteen thirty five, he ran into some trouble with
his publisher, and the details, as is often the case
with his story, are unclear, although it seems as though
a publisher that he'd been working with on several multi
volume books of prints suddenly went bankrupt, and consequently later

(16:55):
books that were supposed to come out went unpublished. With
this problem with his publisher, hoku Size commercial output really
dropped tremendously. Japan was also hit with an enormous economic
depression from eighteen thirty three eighteen thirty seven, and that
dried up demand for hokus Size work, and his studio

(17:17):
and its contents were destroyed in a fire in eighteen
thirty nine. In spite of all this and of the
changes in the market for artwork, hokus I continued to
be tremendously creative right through the end of his life.
He experimented with paintings and festival floats, and he designed
a sculpture. He died in eighteen forty nine, at the

(17:37):
age of ninety by the Japanese method of counting and
eighty nine by the Western method uh He said he'd
be a truly skilled painter if he lived to be
a hundred and at that point he had put out
just an enormous body of work, a lot of it
just extremely playful. He experimented with new ways of approaching artwork.

(18:00):
He made all of these creative strides, but he was like, yeah,
if I could just live to be a hundred, then
I'd be a really skilled painter. Just ten more years
would get me there. So he drew and painted so
many things, but so much of his work was in
the form of wood black prints. And we're going to
talk a little bit more about how these prints were

(18:21):
made and also about how Hokusai later influenced Western art.
After another brief word from a sponsor. So often when
we talk about visual artists on the show, we're talking
about people who made each piece of art as one thing.

(18:44):
So painters and sculptors and potters and textile artists, they
make a work of art, and while you can see
pictures of that work of art or maybe make prints
of it, there's only one original. Like you go to
a museum and you see the Mona Lisa, there's one
of it that's not the eased for one of hokusis
primary media, the wood block print. Hokus size. Woodblock prints

(19:05):
include all the typical subjects of the ukio A school,
as well as waterfalls, birds and flowers, dragons, ghosts and monsters, fish, lanterns.
It goes on and on in a huge range of subjects.
Printmaking isn't unique to Japanese art, but in the Edo
period in particular, wood black prints were a very popular

(19:27):
form of art in Japan. First, the artist would create
the picture, then a block cutter would put that picture
face down onto the wooden block, secure it there, and
very very carefully cut out the block along the lines
of the artwork. A black and white work could use
just one block, but for a color work, the block
carver would take an impression of that original carving to

(19:49):
make a different block for each layer of color. To
make the actual prints, print printmakers inked the block lay
paper over it, and they rubbed the back to transfer
for the ink onto the paper. This made print making
a collaborative, collective form of art, and says Hokusai himself
had worked as a block carver, he had perspectives that

(20:09):
came from all parts of this process. There was no
press involved that a lot of people think of when
making prints. With these blocks, printmakers could make lots and
lots of copies of the same work of art, which
is why you can find copies of the Great Wave
and other Edo period prints that came from those original
blocks in museums all over the world, rather than just

(20:31):
one museum, and it also meant that a lot of
people living at the time were able to afford to
buy his work and have artwork on their walls. Hocusize
work was actually at one point even printed on papers
for rice snacks, almost like collectible cereal boxes. Like the
The snack manufacturer was was hoping that people would want
to buy their snacks more so they could have more

(20:52):
Hokusi art from the rappers. I love it. I wish
we could get works of art with our snacks. Uh
come into our Matthew Perry arrived in Japan on July
eighteenth of eighteen fifty three, just a few years after
hokusized death, and acting on behalf of the US government,
he demanded that Japan open trade to the West. Although
Perry's fleet was small, Japan had no navy with which

(21:14):
to defend itself, and so it was forced to negotiate.
Japan and the United States signed a trading agreement in
eighteen fifty four. Further treaties followed, most of them unequal
and benefiting the other trading partners more than Japan. Naturally,
this affected Japan as a nation dramatically. For example, the

(21:35):
Tokugawa shogunate fell and was replaced by an emperor. But
our focus here is really going to stay on the artwork.
While Hoka size work had begun to fall out of
imperial favor, this newly opened trade with the West sparked
a craze for Japanese art and culture. Fans. Kimonos, screens,
and porcelain were in huge demand in the West. Diplomats, tourists,

(21:59):
and officials who visited Japan also came home with the
artwork that they bought while living there. A big part
of the m f a s Japanese artwork collection is
actually a donation from Dr William Sturtis Bigelow, who lived
in Japan from eighteen eighty two to eighteen eighty nine
and then donated the collection of art that he acquired
while there to the museum in nineteen eleven. For those

(22:21):
who didn't acquire their Japanese art and artifacts by visiting Japan,
all this enthusiasm for Japanese culture had the unfortunate effect
of giving westerners a rather warped and stereotypical view of Japan. However,
would black prints and other Japanese art wound up being
hugely influential to artists in the West as well, and

(22:42):
this are this influence became known as Japanis m. Felix Bruquamant,
who was a French Impressionist painter, found a set of
hoku sized manga in Paris in eighteen fifty six. He
started sharing hoku sized work with his artist friends, and
soon other Impressionist artists were really seeking out and learning
from hokus eye art as well as the other as

(23:03):
well as the work of other artists from the uk
o A school, the Impressionist painters started to imitate the
use of color, lines and perspectives along with hokus eyes,
often very playful treatment of visual subjects. Claude Monet acquired
about two hundred and fifty Japanese prints, twenty three of
them by Hokusai, and then, like Hokusai, he made a

(23:25):
practice of painting the same thing in many angles and
from many settings. You can see this clear Japanese influence,
for example in Ari de Devan Japonet and Vincent van
Goes la Cortezen and a series of etchings by Mary Cassatt. Yeah,
if you if you sort of line up lots of

(23:46):
uh hokus I prints and other work from the uk
A school next to lots of Impressionist and post Impressionist work. Um.
It's pretty easy in a lot of cases, even for
a late person who's not like deeply uh and meshed
in the world of art and art history, to see, um,
to see the progression from this Japanese art style into

(24:09):
Western art. It's pretty fascinating. I love it. I love it.
I do too this well. And so I did not
know how enormous this exhibition was when I went in there. Uh.
I thought it was about half the size that it was.
And then I came around a corner and it was
basically that entire size of what I had just seen
doubled again or stuff. Uh. And a lot of it

(24:32):
is really incredible, um, some of it. You know, there's
a whole, a whole Japanese artwork section of the museum
that you can see at any time, even when this
exhibition is not part of it anymore. UM. But I
do really like that, uh, that this artwork was printed
on mass and popularly consumed UM. And so you know,

(24:55):
lots of folks just bought prints as a matter of course,
and you have all these prints that are still in
pristine condition that date back to the eighteen fifties and
before in museums all over the world. I think that's
pretty interesting. It's fabulous he has it has less of
the concern about where that art should wipe rightfully be

(25:16):
since the same prints are also available in many museums
in Japan. Uh. I know that's a question that comes
up sometimes when we're talking about art and what is
in museums around the world and where it came from. Yeah,
thank you so much for joining us today for this
Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email

(25:38):
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(25:59):
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