Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo — present-day Tokyo — in 1760. He trained under the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunshō and worked in a style of woodblock print and painting that depicted contemporary urban life, landscape, and the full range of human experience. He was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime, changing them as his style and subjects evolved. He worked until his death at eighty-eight, reportedly lamenting that he had only just begun to understand how to draw. He is best known in the West for his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, which includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa — one of the most recognized images in the history of art. The series was made between 1830 and 1833, when Hokusai was in his seventies. It influenced van Gogh, Monet, Debussy, and the wave of Japonisme that reshaped European art in the second half of the 19th century. He also made shunga — the Japanese tradition of erotic woodblock prints that flourished in the Edo period. His masterpiece in the genre is The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814), a woodblock from the three-volume book Kinoe no Komatsu, which depicts a woman entwined with two octopuses in a scene that the text, written in the voice of the octopuses, makes explicit and comic. It is among the most discussed erotic images in world art. Rodin owned it. Picasso made his own version in 1903. It has been in continuous cultural circulation for two centuries. For Hokusai, as for most ukiyo-e artists, shunga was serious work in the same tradition as everything else — better paid than landscape prints, technically demanding, and entirely continuous with the aesthetics of the larger practice. The separation between the celebrated landscape master and the maker of erotic prints is a distinction that Western reception imposed on a body of work that did not organize itself that way. He produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and images for picture books. At ninety, he was still working.

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