posted on 16 Jan 2025

Hokusai: A Life in Drawing by Henri-Alexis Baatsch

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) has become one of the few instantly recognised Japanese artists here in the West, primarily for his woodcut prints of Mount Fuji (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji) and for The Great Wave, the depiction of a tsunami-like wave in mid-peak. Hokusai: a Life in Drawing is a beautifully designed and presented introduction to his life and work which opens the door to his wider significance and his range.

Much of Hokusai’s output was done within the school of Japanese woodblock art know as ‘The Floating World’ or Ukiyo-e, which was a name applied to artists working in Edo (the former name of Tokyo) who focused not on idealised ideas of the great and good but on the real lives of the ordinary and the marginalised.

Hokusai came along towards the end of the time period usually associated with Ukiyo-e and brought with him a new dimension and new daring. One of the names that Hokusai liked to adopt for himself was Gakyojin – which translates as ‘madman of art’ – which gives, I think, a perfect window on the man. Although he mentored plenty of other artists, he never founded a ‘school’ of his own and this decision really casts light on someone who rather enjoyed being unpredictable and something of an outsider.

Working in the medium of woodblock prints, usually on single sheets, makes it especially hard to pin down what his output really was. As Baatsch says in his text:

“The ‘thirty-thousand drawings’ attributed to him are the output of a lifetime, but the catalogue of his known work is little more than a series of markers.”

The success of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji saw him creating something new. As Baatsch says:

“With Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai established a new aesthetic, one he would go on to explore and develop in his other print series.”

Of these new series, I would personally recommend A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces and One Hundred Ghost Stories. He also went on to create a collection of small ink studies he called ‘Manga’ – a name that now has different connotations in Japanese cinema and comic art.

But, in all honesty, it’s not the biographical essay that you’ll want this book for. It is short and informative but leaves something to be desired in terms of style – I’m not sure whether the clumsiness of the writing is down to the author or the problems of translation but either way it doesn’t make for the most compelling of reads.

What does leap out though is the volume and quality of the prints and the lavish quantity of the paper. Bound as a paperback encased in a hard cover closed by a ribbon tie, the prints come on pages that are double-looped to avoid bleed-though of ink from one side of the page to the other.

Published by Thames and Hudson, this is not a cheap book to buy but if your desire is to find a book containing a wide range of Hokusai’s work, beautifully printed and presented, this is for you.

 

Terry Potter

January 2025