Celebrating Japan’s Most Famous Artist

Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830-31), perhaps the most iconic image in Japanese art, is on view in the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition Hokusai through August 9. Images courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Although hardly a household name in the United States, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is widely considered Japan’s greatest artist, and a new retrospective of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts makes an eloquent and compelling case for that. Featuring more than 230 works from a career that spanned over seven decades, the exhibition, titled Hokusai, attests to both the artist’s superb skill and his reputation for innovation.

The show reveals the full scope of Hokusai’s work. Best known for his woodblock prints, he was also a gifted painter and book illustrator and a top designer of toy prints and dioramas, painted fans and screens, advertising posters, and even a board game, all being shown in the exhibition. He also took on numerous private commissions, and became well known for a series of sketchbooks that taught aspiring artists how to draw. Along the way, he elevated landscape and nature painting (what the Japanese refer to as bird and flower pictures) to major genres. The works repeatedly demonstrate Hokusai’s fascination with perspective, and show just how radical an innovator he was. From the beginning of his career, he incorporated Western-style vanishing-point perspective into his work.

Hokusai is organized by theme rather than chronology: urban pleasures, views of Mount Fuji, waterfalls and bridges, ingenious designs, private commissions, nature studies, and legends and literature. The first gallery is devoted to the pleasures of daily life in Edo (now Tokyo), which in the artist’s time was the largest city in the world. Hokusai was a master of images of urban life known as ukio-e (“pictures of the Floating World”), especially his prints of Kabuki actors and beautiful women. Of particular note is the magnificent print Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror, from about 1805. A poem painted above the mirror refers to the letter the woman holds. Another highlight is The Dutch Picture Lens: Eight Views of Edo (ca. 1802): eight woodblock miniature prints offering minutely observed depictions of the city’s teeming street life. Each is exquisitely rendered and filled with pulsating movement.

In the second gallery is Hokusai’s most famous work, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Completed when he was in his 70s, this series of woodblock prints portrays the sacred mountain from myriad angles and various distances, seasons, and times of day. The virtuosic undertaking was his first significant landscape series. Included is perhaps the most iconic image in Japanese art—the celebrated Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1831-32), best known by its nickname, The Great Wave. The towering swell offers a glimpse of the mountain in its arching curve and made Hokusai a star at home, and later, abroad. It is also notable for his pioneering use of an imported European pigment known as Prussian blue, which had become cheap enough in Japan to be used in both woodblock prints and paintings. He used it along with indigo to create a range of never-before-seen shades of blue.

Another dazzling image from the series is Fine Wind, Clear Weather, often referred to as Red Fuji, which depicts Mount Fuji bathed in warm red light. Whereas many of the prints show the mountain from afar, poking out between buildings, across a lake, or behind the branches of a tree, here it takes center stage. The series was so popular with the public that Hokusai added another 10 images to the original 36.

He went on to produce several series of landscape prints, each with a unifying subject matter. The MFA show contains many works from series on waterfalls and bridges. As the exhibition notes, his images of Japan did much to contribute to the West’s growing consciousness of Japanese culture and played an enormous role in setting off the late 19th-century craze for all things Japanese (Japonisme), which influenced the French Impressionists in particular.

Not only was the MFA the first major US museum to collect Japanese art, but in 1892 it was the first in the world to exhibit Hokusai’s work, so it’s fitting that the museum has mounted this paean to Japan’s most famous artist.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of MFA’s department of Asian art. Remarkably, everything in the show is drawn from the museum’s own collection of Hokusai’s work, which is the largest in the world. That’s largely a result of bequests by William Sturgis Bigelow, a physician who gave up medicine to devote his life to studying Japanese culture and collecting Japanese art. Bigelow lived in Japan from 1882 to 1889 and was a museum trustee after he returned to Boston. He bequeathed 4,000 Japanese paintings and 30,000 woodblock prints and other objects to the MFA.

Viewers should plan to spend at least a couple of hours at the exhibition. Not only is there is a lot to see, but much of the work is small and visitors may want to spend time in front of each print. The admission price allows a free return within 10 days, but don’t wait too long. The exhibition ends August 9.

Hokusai is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, through Sunday, August 9. The museum is open Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. and Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 9:45 p.m. Admission is free for members and students with a BU ID; $25 for adults; $23 for seniors and students 18 and over; free for children ages 6 and under and youth 7 to 17 on weekdays after 3 p.m., weekends, and Boston public school holidays (otherwise $10). The museum is free to the public on Wednesday evenings. Take an MBTA Green Line E trolley or the number 39 bus to the Museum of Fine Arts stop or the Orange Line train or bus routes 8, 47, or C2 to the Ruggles stop.