Hokusai.(Book Review)

Polonius touts the traveling troupe to Hamlet:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

 
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, 
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, 
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem 
unlimited .... these are the only men. 

Switch from drama to art, and the Japanese artist Hokusai is the only man. He did all of these things on paper and silk, making paintings, drawings, prints, illustrated books, and manuals for painters and craftsmen. Always, he refused to be bound by the artistic conventions that prevailed from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century in Japan. In fact, he refused to be kept from painting ceaselessly until he died at the age of nearly ninety in 1849. Then he is said to have declared "if only the Heavens had granted me just five years more, I would have become a great artist!" Edgar Degas put this passion for perfection into context: "Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself."

Hokusai's most famous picture, Beneath the Wave off Kanagawa (a detail is illustrated above) is known to everyone, for it has appeared on telephone cards, calculators, washing machines, book and magazine covers, on compact discs, and in Western and Japanese comic books. Often overlooked are the two lean fishing boats embraced by the wave and, in the distance, Mount Fuji, for this is a print in one of Hokusai's most famous series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. In other views the iconic mountain alternately looms and lurks behind trees, people, and boats. In Turban-Shell Tower, Five-Hundred Rakan Temple, Fuji is dead ahead of a viewing stand full of well-dressed spectators. Claude Monet used the format in The Terrace at Sainte Adresse, where Mount Fuji has been replaced by distant sailboats and steamers.

Hokusai's range was extraordinary. In 1804 he had two hundred square meters of ground covered with paper. He set out on this great canvas with a bamboo broom and a bucket of ink and began to paint. In the end, to the astonishment of the gathered crowd, the apparently random lines had created a bust of Bodai-Daruma, the patriarch of Zen Buddhism. To counterbalance this happening. Hokusai is said to have attempted painting a flock of sparrows on a grain of rice. Another tour de force was an instructional manual of drawings of animals, pilgrims, wrestlers, and landscapes, each executed without once lifting the brush from the sheet. Switching gears again, Hokusai created a series especially for children, which consisted of a set of sheets each showing a different actor along with six costumes that the child could cut out and apply, depending on the role the actor was playing. For adults, Hokusai showed his skill at shunga (spring pictures), which are, in fact, the complex erotica familiar to every inquisitive adolescent who has happened onto a book of Japanese prints. Since completely naked bodies are rarely depicted in Japanese art, the cavorting couples in the spring pictures are a blur of colorful brocades, with here and there a foot or a hand poking out, and always hugely exaggerated private parts painted with great attention to detail. The problem is ...