Under the Great Wave: Hokusai and Hiroshige Review – How Two Japanese Masters Reinvented Art | Art and design

TPrinted images made in Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, known collectively as “Floating World Pictures”, can be purchased from a local bookstore for the price of a bowl of noodles. These mass-produced media were collected episodically, such as posters or magazines, initially as sexy, glamorous, and glamorous snapshots of high life in Tokyo for the vicarious enjoyment of those who could not afford them. They were manufactured by workshops of artists and craftsmen, making professional works of art available to ordinary people for the first time. It is stunningly beautiful, and changed the history of art.

The first and most popular subjects for these collectible prints were famous actors from Kabuki theater and beautiful women, usually courtesans from the Yoshiwara brothel district. By introducing us to the inhabitants of the floating world, the first half of this dazzling exhibition sheds light on the dreams and desires that drive popular culture. The portrait Kunichika paints of an actor in the role of a “celestial being” is as heartfelt and gender-bending as Rudolph Valentino in a bolero jacket. The “modern beauty” captured by Izan applying lipstick, her delicately twisted ankle visible through the gap in her gorgeous dress, is sexy in an unavoidably (and by design) voyeuristic way. You can imagine finding this half-naked model, glimpsed through an open door, in the pages of Italian Vogue.

That these images are infringing is part and parcel of their charge. In a famous photograph by Hiroshige (one of the two masters around which this show is built), a man leaving a red light district at dawn covers his face so as not to be recognized. The more of these images I see, the more aware I become of the darkness behind this magic. The two young girls who accompany three sex workers in a very elegant portrait painted by Shunzhou are spending their apprenticeship in the industry, and were probably bought by the brothel from families too poor to support their female children. It has become clear that hedonism is contradicted, and perhaps exacerbated, by the desperation that is kept off the stage.

Then you arrive at Hiroshige’s heartbreaking image of a geisha on the banks of a river at night. Her lantern-carrying accompaniment is cut short, so that we see a woman whose job is to entertain others through music and dance standing alone against the shimmering darkness. Not only does her brooding reveal a startling new psychological complexity, but the mold of her mouth economically expresses what the Japanese call Monoscience has no knowledgeOr the beautiful and sad declaration that all things must pass. We cannot know what was on her mind, but we can be sure that this deep thought was precipitated by (and cannot be separated from) the deep feeling.

This paradox—that we approach eternal truths only when we have reason to reflect on the transient nature of the world—animates all great art, to which the second half of this exhibition undoubtedly belongs. It focuses on landscapes produced by Hiroshige and the most influential of all Japanese artists, Hokusai, in the mid-nineteenth century. In it we witness a remarkable expansion of the horizons of commercial printing from the pleasure districts of Tokyo to the frontiers of the universe. This miracle, similar to those that astonished Elizabethan London and Renaissance Florence, cannot be attributed to a single cause, although the masterpieces here suggest several contributing factors.

The first was exposure to another way of constructing the visual world, made possible by the arrival of European art with Dutch sailors. Clearly delighted with this new toolbox, Hokusai used the Western perspective to compose landscapes that combined the dramatic depth and stunning graphics featured in his groundbreaking “36 Views of Mount Fuji” series (a series so popular that, as a blockbuster, it continued, eventually reaching number 46). Not to be outdone, the younger Hiroshige responded with his impressive fifty-three stops on the Tokaido Route. This scenic tour of the journey from Tokyo to Kyoto blends Western and Asian compositional models to construct hallucinatory vistas that would later fascinate the Impressionists and, by way of return, transform European painting.

There is not enough space (in this article, online) to adequately describe the combinations of colors that Hokusai gives to the sky through the pine trees and plum gardens (one literal translation of Monoscience has no knowledge he ” Yes!-ness of things”, which is probably the closest we can get to it.

The most famous of all the prints shown here is, of course, the great wave that gives this show its title, and which will be known to anyone who has visited a university common room. Knowing Hokusai’s photo made her comfortable, but this was a terrifying vision. The wave threatens to sink not only the fishing boats towing it, but also Mount Fuji itself, a symbol of Japan and guarantor of divine order (as the exhibition literature suggests, one plausible source for the mountain’s name is Fu shiOr “no death”). This apocalyptic scene speaks to the anxiety of recent decades of Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, the near end of the prosperous Edo period, and the awareness that great change was coming.

Hokusai’s Wave is displayed next to Hiroshige’s Homage, which was printed about 25 years later. This supremely harmonious composition (in which Mount Fuji stands undisturbed, and time seems to have stopped) not only demonstrates the differences in temperament and technique between the artists, but also presents the most difficult to quantify factor in the transformation of woodblock prints from popular, disposable media into tools for expanding human consciousness. It is the almost simultaneous emergence of artists who were able to access thoughts and feelings that were previously out of reach, and to make these thoughts and feelings accessible to large numbers of other people. The shortcut for this is genius.

This abbreviation should not obscure the fact that Hokusai and Hiroshige relied on independently talented collaborators, or that they were products of a particular time and place. But it serves to connect them with other thinkers who shared their preoccupation with understanding how the changing appearance of things could be reconciled with the persistence of ideas and identities, and who also came to the conclusion that the boundaries between life and death are more fluid than we are traditionally equipped to perceive. So they showed us this: The dust from the crest of Hokusai’s wave turns into the snow that falls on Mount Fuji; The splashes of foam created by Hiroshige transform into a flock of birds flying over its peak.