SYMHC Classics: Hokusai

Published Jan 11, 2020, 2:00 PM

We're revisiting our 2015 episode on Hokusai, who lived during a time when there was not a lot of contact between Japan and the West. But even so, he drew some influence form Western art, and Western art was greatly influenced by his own work.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Not long ago, we talked about Murasaki Shikibu and in passing we mentioned Japan's Edo period and the work of Katsushika Hokusai. That episode came out way back in so it seemed like a good time to share it again, especially since it also connects to our fairly recent episode on the mysteries of the color Blue. And we kick off this episode with a talk about a trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the contents of a time capsule that we're temporarily on display there, as well as an exhibition on Hokusi that was running at the time. Of course, that visit which Tracy made to the m f A was also back in those things you're no longer on display. Please don't go and ask to see them. They will look at you confusedly. Yeah, there's uh, there's plenty of other stuff to see at the m f A should you want to go, but not those particular things anyway, And enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry, So that's time. I went to the Museum of Fine Art Boston and saw that time capsule that had been pulled out from the cornerstone of the Old State House. I had three things on my to do list on that trip. There was that time capsule. There was Gustav Klimps Adam and Eve, which was on loan from a museum in Vienna. And there was a huge exhibition of artwork by the Japanese artist best known as Katsushika Hokusai. And in addition to that to do list, I wound up also seeing lots of Leonardo da Vinci sketches and some World War One propaganda posters, and a whole series of photos inspired by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in So just to give you a sense of how many amazing things there are at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Uh, if you've never heard of Hokusa, you will probably still recognize his most famous work, which is Under the Wave off Kinda Gaua, which is better known as the Great Wave. This is the one that shows three little boats in the shadow of an enormous menacing frothing wave with Mount Fuji shown in the background. Hokus I lived during a time when there was not a lot of contact between Japan and the West, but even so he drew some influence from Western art, and then Western art was later greatly influenced by his own work and from others from the time period when he lived. His career was also extremely long and diverse, and his work was just prolific. This collection of work at the m f A in Boston is huge, and the temporary exhibition of it is so big that we actually had to take a break from looking at it and go eat and come back because it's enormous. Uh. The m f A actually describes its collection of Japanese art as the largest and finest outside of Japan. So hokosa is who we are going to talk about today. Hokosa I was born in Edo, which is now Tokyo, in seventeen sixty and he lived during Japan's Edo Period also called the Tokugawa period. The Edo period lasted for about two hundred fifty years starting in the early sixteen hundreds. Hoka Size work grew directly from a number of social changes that took place in Japan during this period. The period before the Tokugawa came to power was known as the Sengoku period, and it was also nicknamed the Warring States period because it was marked with war, unrest, and strife. The Tokugawa took several steps to try to secure their power and prevent a return to the state of perpetual conflict once they were in power. The first was that the Tokugawa Shoguns banned Christianity and expelled all Europeans from Japan except for the Dutch, and the Dutch were exempt because they hadn't tried to convert the Japanese, but even Dutch contact with Japan was limited it, as was Japan's contact with its nearer neighbors of China and Korea. The second was that the Tokugawa required the feudal lords, who were known as the damio who ruled Japan's provinces in their stead, to maintain two residences. One was an Edo and the other was back in their home province. The daimio were expected to travel back and forth between these residences while their families stayed in Edo full time. The residences of the daimio were expected to be lavish and opulent, and when they traveled back and forth between their home provinces and Edo, they were expected to do so at great luxury and with a large retinue of mostly unmarried samurai. There was an ulterior motive to all this. The Tokugawa and Edo always had an eye on the damio's families, which basically functioned as a tacit threat to their safety to keep the daimio in line. And in addition to all of that, uh they had to spend so much money on these multiple residences and the travel back and forth that the daimio could never afford to raise an army to challenge the Tokugawa's power. So it was sort of a way to keep everybody in line. And as a sign note, this plan was not entirely successful in a group of ronan or masterless samurai tried to orchestrate a coup against the Tokugawa. Even though the Daimio were employing quite a lot of samurai, there were many others who were effectively out of work once the Warring States period was over. However, these requirements that were placed on the daimio affected life for other people in Japan as well. Number one, people were traveling a lot. Even though Japan wasn't having much contact with the rest of the world, travel within its own borders really became its own industry. Five major highways connected Eddo to the rest of Japan, and these were aligned with places to rest, eat, arranged transportation, buy things, and make religious observances. The most famous of these was the Tokaido Road also called the Eastern Sea Road, and this connected Edo to Kyoto before going on to Osaka. And although the daimyo traveled these roads at great expense, ordinary people were also using them. Society under the Tokugawa became divided into four classes. There were warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants. And even though the merchants were technically at the bottom of the pile since they just sold the work of other people rather than creating work of their own, a lot of the merchants became quite rich. Japan became home to a thriving middle class thanks to all of these different industries and the increased commerce that was coming with people traveling everywhere and maintaining multiple residences in Edo, visiting daimyo and their large retinues of samurai tipped the gender balance within the city, spawning another industry, one of pleasure and entertainment to cater to their interests. This whole world of fashion, luxury, and amusement became known as the floating world or okio. The newly wealthy merchants and artisans had access to the floating world as well. It also spawned a whole school of art called u k o A or Pictures of a Floating World. And these were basically pictures, paintings and wood black prints of things like pleasure districts, courtisign's, geisha tea houses, kabuki actors, that sort of thing, and they were hugely popular among the growing middle class. It was in this school of art that Hokuside trained as an artist, and we're going to talk about how that training came about after a brief word from a sponsor. So to return to Hokusai specifically, we know a lot more about his professional life than about his personal life. There's a fair amount of contradiction when it comes to the details of his biography, thanks to it's a and the fact that a lot of knowledge of it that survives today is kind of glean from a wide range of sources, like introductions he wrote to his own books, and notes from other artists that were compiled well after his death. He was born Kawamura Tokitaro. He had an uncle named Nakajima isay who was a mirror polisher. This was actually a prestigious position because mirrors at the time were mainly made from bronze rather than silvered glass. Mirror polishing required a special and exact set of skills, and hokus Eye uncle had no heir to train to take over this position, so hokusis uncle adopted him, and later on reflections, refractions, lenses, and optical effects would become a huge part of hokusize work. Hokus I started writing and drawing at the age of six, and these are two skills that are really connected quite closely in Japanese culture thanks to the use of kanji in written language. Later on, hokus I would also say that anyone who could write could also draw, and he would create these paintings that were basically built up from a series of written words. It's unclear whether hokus I just didn't want to be a mirror polisher, or whether he didn't get along with his uncle, or whether he correctly concluded that bronze mirrors were going to go out of fashion, but regardless, as a teen he did not pursue his uncle's line of work. He worked instead for a publisher and a lending library, and he worked as a block carver, making blocks for woodblock prints, even though he demonstrated a talent for art at a very young age, and his uncle's position meant he could get access to the showguns official painters hocus as formal education in art didn't actually start until he was nineteen. He joined the studio of Katsukawa Centual a uk O a artist in seventeen seventy nine. Katsukawa some shows specialty was woodblock prints of kabuki actors. While working in Katsukawa is Stu to You, hokus I signed his Prince shun rule, which is a combination of a character from his teacher's name plus an additional character, and this was traditionally how art students would sign their work with like a character from their teacher's name plus another character of their own, choosing hokus I worked with the Katsukawa School until seventeen ninety four, and these years are known as hokus Chunro period. During this period, he also illustrated about fifty books, and he made woodblock prints of a lot of subjects that were common in the u k o A school. Although little of his painting work survives from this period, it's clear that he studied painting at the Katsukawa school as well. Hokus I also started experimenting with Western style vanishing point perspectives in his work during this time, and that's a theme that would resurface later on. Sun Show died in seventeen ninety two, and two years later, for reasons that aren't completely clear, hokus I left the school and stopped using the name shun Roll. He found another position now that Tawaria family hired him to train their son, whose father, an artist, had died. Hokus I was allowed to use the name Suli, which was the name of the deceased father, until his son was ready to assume his role as heir and leader of the family's school. The Tawaria family apparently had quite a bit of wealth and status, so while he was with them, hokus I had access to the best paints, inks, and other art materials, and for about four years he produced a large number of privately commissioned prints known as surimono, as well as a number of paintings. Working with privately commissioned prince gave Hokusi some artistic freedoms he didn't have before. He didn't need to worry about sticking with less expensive printing inks because the print runs themselves were much smaller and everything was being paid for by his patrons. A lot of these works were commissioned by poetry clubs as accompaniment for playful works of poetry. Because of this work in private commissions, Hokusai developed friendships with many prominent poets and other well known figures, and he seems to have been quite financially prosperous during his story period as well. It was in the spring of when the Tawaria Air assumed control of the family school that Hokosa gave up on the soul Re name and began working under the name Hokusai Tokimasa. He would continue to change his name from time to time after this point, which is a pretty common practice among artists in the Edo period, but the name Hokusai is the one that he really became recognized for He became so well known under that name that even as he used other names, he would often add Saki no Hokusai or the former Hokusai to his works. It's like the artists formerly known as Prince Um. After leaving the Tawaraia family, he also experimented with a lot of forms of art besides the standard Prince paintings and book illustrations that had made up a large portion of his work before. He made a board game depicting a journey from Edo to several pilgrimage sites and back again. He also created puzzles and a deck of playing cards based on the tail of Genji. He produced books of his own, including manuals on how to draw, and he published sketch books known as manga. He also made lots and lots of dioramas. These were intricate illustrations that were printed on one flat sheet or maybe two. You really needed a lot of them, and they were meant to be carefully cut out and then assembled, with the cut pieces standing up vertically, which would create a three dimensional scene. Many of these were extremely complex and detailed. One of the prints in the m f A's exhibition is one of these uncut and working from a copy of it, curators tried to create an assembled version to kind of accompany it so you could see the flat one as it was printed and the assembled one. It took them multiple tries to get it to do. We mentioned before that we don't know a great deal about hokusais personal life, but what we do know is that he experienced a series of tragedy starting around eight twenty. His oldest daughter had married one of his students and they divorced in hokus I became very very ill, and a year later his wife died. His grandson, son of the daughter who had divorced, did something. The details of what exactly it was are unclear, but whatever it was led Hokusai into some really huge financial problems. His third daughter, on the other hand, was named Katsushika Oi, and she became a wonderful artist on her own, and it's possible that she helped her father with some of his work. I actually originally wanted to do the episode on her because she seems to have been quite a character who loved sake quite a lot, and she would sometimes substitute one of the characters in her name, for one meaning drunk instead when she signed her artwork. But unfortunately, yeah, we know even less about her and have way less of a body of work to drop round to talk about uh Katsushika Oi than we do about her father. And it's possible that all these tragedies and the lack of money that followed were what spurred hokus I into making his most famous work of art, Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji. As its name suggests, there are thirty six prints each featuring Mount Fuji in some way, and the Great Wave is one of those. The series fit in well with a trend that was rushing through Japan at that point, which was sets of full sized landscape prints that worked together as a series. Another of these series that you may have heard of is Hero She Gay's fifty three Stations of the Tokaido Road. Hokusai himself also did a series on the stations of the Tokaido Road, but Hero she Gays became more famous than than Hoku Size did. Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji was also inspired by Prussian Blue ink, which was newly available in Japan and known as Berlin Blue there. It led to a huge demand for artwork that used the color blue, and while the public clamored for azerier or prints done entirely in shades of blue, hokus I started using the blue paint for the outlines on his landscapes, which had traditionally been black, and he also used them for prints of birds and flowers. Hocus I also used lots of blue in his work in general during this craze for blue, and some of the prints in the thirty six Views of Mount Fuji in their first edition printing, are almost entirely blue. As people became less enamored with the color blue, The same blocks would then be used to print new editions of these works, but with more colors in them, so they weren't quite so overwhelmingly blue. After the success of the thirty six Views of Mount Fuji, hokus I created just an enormous number of landscape prints, but around eighteen thirty four eighteen thirty five, he ran into some trouble with his publisher, and the details, as is often the case with his story, are unclear, although it seems as though a publisher that he'd been working with on several multi volume books of prints suddenly went bankrupt, and consequently later books that were supposed to come out went unpublished. With this problem with his publisher, hoku Size commercial output really dropped tremendously. Japan was also hit with an enormous economic depression from eighteen thirty three eighteen thirty seven, and that dried up demand for hokus Size work, and his studio and its contents were destroyed in a fire in eighteen thirty nine. In spite of all this and of the changes in the market for artwork, hokus I continued to be tremendously creative right through the end of his life. He experimented with paintings and festival floats, and he designed a sculpture. He died in eighteen forty nine, at the age of ninety by the Japanese method of counting and eighty nine by the Western method uh He said he'd be a truly skilled painter if he lived to be a hundred and at that point he had put out just an enormous body of work, a lot of it just extremely playful. He experimented with new ways of approaching artwork. He made all of these creative strides, but he was like, yeah, if I could just live to be a hundred, then I'd be a really skilled painter. Just ten more years would get me there. So he drew and painted so many things, but so much of his work was in the form of wood black prints. And we're going to talk a little bit more about how these prints were made and also about how Hokusai later influenced Western art. After another brief word from a sponsor. So often when we talk about visual artists on the show, we're talking about people who made each piece of art as one thing. So painters and sculptors and potters and textile artists, they make a work of art, and while you can see pictures of that work of art or maybe make prints of it, there's only one original. Like you go to a museum and you see the Mona Lisa, there's one of it that's not the eased for one of hokusis primary media, the wood block print. Hokus size. Woodblock prints include all the typical subjects of the ukio A school, as well as waterfalls, birds and flowers, dragons, ghosts and monsters, fish, lanterns. It goes on and on in a huge range of subjects. Printmaking isn't unique to Japanese art, but in the Edo period in particular, wood black prints were a very popular form of art in Japan. First, the artist would create the picture, then a block cutter would put that picture face down onto the wooden block, secure it there, and very very carefully cut out the block along the lines of the artwork. A black and white work could use just one block, but for a color work, the block carver would take an impression of that original carving to make a different block for each layer of color. To make the actual prints, print printmakers inked the block lay paper over it, and they rubbed the back to transfer for the ink onto the paper. This made print making a collaborative, collective form of art, and says Hokusai himself had worked as a block carver, he had perspectives that came from all parts of this process. There was no press involved that a lot of people think of when making prints. With these blocks, printmakers could make lots and lots of copies of the same work of art, which is why you can find copies of the Great Wave and other Edo period prints that came from those original blocks in museums all over the world, rather than just one museum, and it also meant that a lot of people living at the time were able to afford to buy his work and have artwork on their walls. Hocusize work was actually at one point even printed on papers for rice snacks, almost like collectible cereal boxes. Like the The snack manufacturer was was hoping that people would want to buy their snacks more so they could have more Hokusi art from the rappers. I love it. I wish we could get works of art with our snacks. Uh come into our Matthew Perry arrived in Japan on July eighteenth of eighteen fifty three, just a few years after hokusized death, and acting on behalf of the US government, he demanded that Japan open trade to the West. Although Perry's fleet was small, Japan had no navy with which to defend itself, and so it was forced to negotiate. Japan and the United States signed a trading agreement in eighteen fifty four. Further treaties followed, most of them unequal and benefiting the other trading partners more than Japan. Naturally, this affected Japan as a nation dramatically. For example, the Tokugawa shogunate fell and was replaced by an emperor. But our focus here is really going to stay on the artwork. While Hoka size work had begun to fall out of imperial favor, this newly opened trade with the West sparked a craze for Japanese art and culture. Fans. Kimonos, screens, and porcelain were in huge demand in the West. Diplomats, tourists, and officials who visited Japan also came home with the artwork that they bought while living there. A big part of the m f a s Japanese artwork collection is actually a donation from Dr William Sturtis Bigelow, who lived in Japan from eighteen eighty two to eighteen eighty nine and then donated the collection of art that he acquired while there to the museum in nineteen eleven. For those who didn't acquire their Japanese art and artifacts by visiting Japan, all this enthusiasm for Japanese culture had the unfortunate effect of giving westerners a rather warped and stereotypical view of Japan. However, would black prints and other Japanese art wound up being hugely influential to artists in the West as well, and this are this influence became known as Japanis m. Felix Bruquamant, who was a French Impressionist painter, found a set of hoku sized manga in Paris in eighteen fifty six. He started sharing hoku sized work with his artist friends, and soon other Impressionist artists were really seeking out and learning from hokus eye art as well as the other as well as the work of other artists from the uk o A school, the Impressionist painters started to imitate the use of color, lines and perspectives along with hokus eyes, often very playful treatment of visual subjects. Claude Monet acquired about two hundred and fifty Japanese prints, twenty three of them by Hokusai, and then, like Hokusai, he made a practice of painting the same thing in many angles and from many settings. You can see this clear Japanese influence, for example in Ari de Devan Japonet and Vincent van Goes la Cortezen and a series of etchings by Mary Cassatt. Yeah, if you if you sort of line up lots of uh hokus I prints and other work from the uk A school next to lots of Impressionist and post Impressionist work. Um. It's pretty easy in a lot of cases, even for a late person who's not like deeply uh and meshed in the world of art and art history, to see, um, to see the progression from this Japanese art style into Western art. It's pretty fascinating. I love it. I love it. I do too this well. And so I did not know how enormous this exhibition was when I went in there. Uh. I thought it was about half the size that it was. And then I came around a corner and it was basically that entire size of what I had just seen doubled again or stuff. Uh. And a lot of it is really incredible, um, some of it. You know, there's a whole, a whole Japanese artwork section of the museum that you can see at any time, even when this exhibition is not part of it anymore. UM. But I do really like that, uh, that this artwork was printed on mass and popularly consumed UM. And so you know, lots of folks just bought prints as a matter of course, and you have all these prints that are still in pristine condition that date back to the eighteen fifties and before in museums all over the world. I think that's pretty interesting. It's fabulous he has it has less of the concern about where that art should wipe rightfully be since the same prints are also available in many museums in Japan. Uh. I know that's a question that comes up sometimes when we're talking about art and what is in museums around the world and where it came from. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart radio app, and where or else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,410 clip(s)