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A spread from one volume of Hokusai's manga |
context: painting > prints > artists
Hokusai 1760-1849
There is a lot of mythologising around Hokusai. I thoroughly approve of this, and am happy to perpetuate some of it, but it's well worth proceeding with plenty of caution. For instance, I've seen it suggested that from 1796-1802 he produced 30,000 different print illustrations. That's a hundred a week for six years. Unless he worked like modern comic artists, with a studio full of assistants, I doubt it - and the stories are that he lived in hovels, filthy and never cleaned, until they became incapable of supporting human life, at which point he'd move house, which sounds incompatible with an efficient team of lackeys.
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Hokusai being scary with a skeletal ghost |
He's my favourite Japanese print-maker, for his restless inventiveness and energy and imagination, the shock of his work even 200 years on, his variety. There is work by Hokusai that is spectacularly dramatic, scary, funny, deeply humane, pretty, and like nothing else ever seen before. He published fifteen books of his manga (the word means something like random or crazy drawings - and has come to mean comics in Japan), packed with many drawings per page, all bursting with vitality.
An external link: a gallery of all 46 images in the famous Thirty-Six View Of Fuji series. (36 originally, but it was extended due to its popularity, though the title was never changed.)