How Hokusai’s Art Crashed Over the Modern World

One of the most influential figures in European modern culture has never set foot in Europe. Katsushika Hokusai, like all subjects in self-isolated Edo Japan, could not have left the archipelago if he wanted to, and his publishers could not export his prints of Kabuki actors, flowers and Mount Fuji. But a few years after his death in 1849, when Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships” sailed into what is now Tokyo Bay, Japan’s markets were violently opened and Hokusai’s logs began to flutter across the ocean. In France, in Britain and soon in America, a whole new kind of art would emerge: born in Tokyo, spread all over the world.

In “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence,” an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints and global contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one of the greatest of all printmakers appears at the core of a global cultural transformation in which art became more urban and ephemeral, erasing the perceived world into signs and symbols . Occasionally pretty and bloated (but well worth the trip), it makes ample use of the MFA’s unparalleled collection of Japanese art. (In fact, the MFA hosted the very first American Hokusai retrospective, in 1892.)

Here you can see more than 100 prints, paintings and paintings by Hokusai manga – literally “whimsical sketches” of bathers and courtesans and birds and beasts, which Hokusai published in 15 best-selling volumes. There are 11 ice crisp sheets from his most famous series, ‘Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji’, including those two coffee mug icons: ‘Fine wind, clear weather”, which distills the lofty mountain into a clay-red cone, and “Under the Gulf of Kanagawa”, better known as the “Great Wave”, in which the snow-capped Fuji almost disappears under a tentacled blue breaker.

As the title implies, “Inspiration and Influence” is a show with two halves. A first volume, set in 18th- and 19th-century Japan, charts Hokusai’s education, apprenticeship, independent career, and instruction of younger creators of the prints dubbed “pictures of the floating world.” He shares these first galleries with his master teacher, Katsukawa Shunshō; his greatest rival, Utagawa Hiroshige; as well as several female artists, including his talented daughter, Katsushika Oh, represented by a handsome scroll painting of an all-female musical trio.

Then comes a more global second half, skipping chronology, media and tone to highlight the global migration and metabolization of Hokusai’s vibrant compositions and civic themes. Prints by Gauguin and Whistler absorb Hokusai’s blocky colors and flattened spaces. There are Japan-like decorative arts from the Steuben Glass Works or Boucheron jewelers, and snatches from Debussy’s “La Mer,” whose published score has Hokusai’s wave on the cover. New art, of more or (often) less importance and subtlety, is related to contemporary manga.

Hokusai himself worked in commercial domains (the Western distinction between fine and popular art was barely clear in the Edo period), so it’s fine that this show jumps from paintings to comic books. He’s now become so entrenched in popular culture that he’s become the only artist with his own emoji: the cresting blue wave [🌊]stripped of the half-drowned fishermen in the original woodblock.

But much of the contemporary work here is chintzy or schematic, and by going for quantity over quality, the second half of the show feels a bit like… a tidal wave washing over you. The MFA’s best impression of Hokusai’s wave appears here not in contemplative isolation, but bustling between imitations, parodies and tributes. We find “Great Wave” copies of Andy Warhol and Yoshitomo Nara; some Mexican waveform bracelets and some trompe-l’oeil surfer-dude furniture; and even a promotional image of slim Olympic champion figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu, swishing in a blue and white costume and with his right arm bent like the Kanagawa surf. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” – on loan from the Museum of Modern Art and depicting a blue-haired woman disappearing beneath silver waves – faces, embarrassingly to say, a replica of Hokusai’s great kahuna made of blue-and-white Lego blocks.

Hokusai was born in 1760, when Japan emerged from a long depression and returned to prosperity. He was adopted by his uncle, who served the shogun as a mirror maker, and at the age of 19 entered Shunsho’s workshop, which specialized in portraying actors and women. In a beautiful side-by-side view of two scroll paintings of master and apprentice, we see Shunsho translating a dancer’s movements into ripples of floral motifsand Hokusai later used the same lines for the bundled fabric of one woman with firewood. The aristocratic and spiritual dimensions of painting gave way to something more fashionable, more mundane. The stage, the street, the bathhouse, the brothel: these, like the Japanese landscape, would become Hokusai’s sources of inspiration and obsessions.

Crucially, his pleasure scenes were more cosmopolitan than Westerners, who idolized the supposedly pristine beauty of “closed Japan,” would later recognize. Hokusai and his students and rivals used Chinese as well as Dutch antecedents to squash the world in color and line, sometimes using foreign pigments imported (or smuggled) through the trading post at Nagasaki.

This show contains two beautiful room dividers with six panels that Shunsho painted around 1790, in which well-dressed women lie along parallel diagonal lines on the same scale — so-called axonometric perspective, a pillar of Chinese painting. Hangs next to it is an exuberant print series by Hokusai that was created 20 years later. It shows a house of pleasures in Edo – but now the ladies in the front are drawn larger than the ladies in the back.

One-point perspective, so revolutionary for the European Renaissance, became known to Japanese artists as early as the 1740s – and they weren’t too impressed. If a few, especially the graphic artist Utagawa Toyoharu, made cunning use of European technique, most seeing it as little more than a party trick. Or so it was until Hokusai started integrate Asian and European methods of spatial delineation into a new, hybrid view of the modern world. My all-time favorite Hokusai is one of the “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (and FYI, for your next art history pub quiz, there are actually 46 views: his publisher asked for some sequels), with travelers blown off a winding road by a sudden gust of victoryD. The figures on the right are arranged along a diagonal in Chinese fashion, but on the left the figures contract and retract upwards, European style. As for Fuji, the most majestic place in the land, it’s nothing but three quick strokes: a dive to the top, a bump to the top, a long glide back to the ground.

Europeans in Hokusai’s time had drawn on Chinese, Persian, and Indian examples in making decorative arts. But when Japanese prints finally began to circulate in Western Europe after his death—particularly in 1870s Paris, defeated in war and fully transforming into a metropolis—they appeared as aesthetic gems as well as spiritual life rafts. In Hokusai and its rivals, young Parisians who lost their roots found a liberation from worn-out visual vocabularies, and Japonism, as the fashion was called, extended from the painter’s salon to the dinner table. Fuji themed ink sets. Velvet curtains decorated with lotus flowers. Fish and poultry transferware copied from manga. “Japonism was radically changing the outlook of the European peoples,” wrote the diarist Edmond de Goncourt. The pottery, the lacquerware and especially the woodblocks “brought Europe a new sense of color, a new decorative system and, if you will, a poetic imagination.”

It hardly needs to be said that these artists, composers and designers had no scholarly interest in Japanese culture, any more than the Japanese printmakers did when depicting the ‘exotic’ West. But French fashion for Japanese things offers one of the richest examples ever of its productive capacity misunderstanding odd things – especially for the artists who would become the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose soft colors, flat planes, and neglect of shadows would never have come about without their Japanese forerunners. It wasn’t just pictorial grammar; it was also Hokusai’s bourgeois sensibility, his attention to theater and fashion and women of the night. That penchant for city life convinced Monet, Degas and their colleagues that their fleeting impressions of modern French life could be the stuff of high art. And even as they succumbed to stereotypes of Japanese delicacy or purity—when they fell into the “battery of desires, oppressions, investments, and projections” that Edward Said called Orientalism—these Europeans were nevertheless changed by Japan, and irrevocably.

The MFA show is too confusing in its second half to properly chart how Hokusai’s example took off worldwide in the 20th century. The contemporary selections, in particular, feel like they’re search engine-controlled, and that Lego “Great Wave” should have stayed with the gift shop. What I really wished for, instead of all those literal waves and mountains, was more the eclecticism that characterized Japonism and that also animated the exchanges between Asia and the West in the 2009 Guggenheim exhibition “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.” A notable miss is the art of Yasumasa Morimura, who traced the misapplications of Japan by European artists in his own alienated self-portraits.

It really would have helped – because a few years ago America was conducting a painfully simplistic debate about how artists from one place should or shouldn’t depict images and objects from another. New shibboleths, expressions such as “lived experience” and “equality of power,” emerged to determine who was entitled to which images, which materials, which forms, which words. (The MFA crashed into these shoals; in 2015 it pulled protests and counter-protests for inviting visitors to try on a kimono for a Japanese portrait of Monet.) But what Hokusai and his successors affirm time and again is that there no such thing as a pure “culture” separable from others – not even the culture of a shogunate whose subjects could not leave on pain of death. Culture is always an ebb and flow of fragmentations and recombinations, of both violent and peaceful encounters. You cannot stay separate; everything floats; your job is to ride the wave.

Hokusai: inspiration and influence

Through July 16, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston; 617-267-9300; mfa.org.