This publication has been developed from ideas first presented at the international symposium Late Hokusai: thought, technique, society, held at the British Museum in May 2017. The symposium was organized to enable specialists in a range of disciplines relating to early modern Japan to view and consider the critically acclaimed exhibition Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave, then being presented at the British Museum. The exhibition brought together representative works by the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760−1849) in the various media in which he worked – color woodblock printed, woodblock-printed illustrated books, brush paintings on paper or silk, and brush drawings − that were produced between the age of 61 and his death aged 90.
Building on the themes of the exhibition, authors from the UK, Europe, Japan and USA have engaged with late Hokusai from a variety of perspectives, both intrinsic and extrinsic to his life and works. Essays have been grouped within the broad categories of ‘thought’ -- Hokusai’s intellectual concerns and the ways his art brought these to life; ‘technique’ – how the artist pursued excellence in a wide range of media, within a commercialized art market; and ‘society’ – dimensions of cultural interaction and patronage. A fourth section on ‘legacy’ looks at how stories of Hokusai have been as much generated by 130 years of scholarship, as they have by his works themselves. Challengingly, faked paintings and printed works have both contaminated and supported those stories. This innovative approach provides new insights into the work of one of the world’s most celebrated artists and suggests many new avenues for Hokusai research.
Director’s Foreword (Hartwig Fischer)
Prefaces from Late Hokusai project partners
Introduction by Timothy Clark
Part 1. Society
1. Tazawa Hiroyoshi, ‘Hokusai: Life and Works’
2. Frank Feltens, ‘Between the Lines: Hokusai in his Letters’
3. Alfred Haft, ‘Hokusai in Obuse: A Study of Cultural Mobility during the Late Edo Period’
4. Julie Nelson Davis, ‘Partners in the Studio: Reconsidering Ōi and Hokusai’
5. Ellis Tinios, ‘The Publisher Tōhekidō (Eirakuya Tōshirō) and the Hokusai “Brand”’
Part 2. Thought
6. Lucia Dolce, ‘The Buddhist World of Hokusai: Lotus Practices and the Religious Frenzy of Urban Edo’
7. Janine Anderson Sawada, ‘Hokusai’s Devotion to Mt Fuji’
8. Yamamoto Yoshitaka, ‘Japan and China in Hokusai’s Ehon kōkyō (Illustrated Classic of Filial Piety)’
9. Angus Lockyer, ‘There be Dragons’
10. Yasuhara Akio, ‘Research note: Hokusai’s Sources -- The Case of an Eighty-One-Scaled Dragon’
Part 3. Technique
11. Timothy Clark, ‘Connoisseurship of Late Hokusai Paintings: Slow Looking, Sharing Collections’
12. John T. Carpenter, ‘Shedding Light on the Authentic Genius of Hokusai the Painter: A Focus on Words from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’
13. Asano Shūgō, ‘Connoisseurship of Unsigned Drawings by Hokusai – A Group of Works in the Collection of Hokusaikan, Obuse’
14. Capucine Korenberg, ‘The Making and Evolution of Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’
Part 4. Legacy
15. Koto Sadamura, ‘Pursuit of the Man Behind the Art: Biographies of Hokusai and Kyōsai by Iijima Kyoshin’
16. Roger Keyes, ‘Notes to the Catalogue Raisonné of the Single-Sheet Colour Woodblock Prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)’
17. Ryōko Matsuba, ‘Facsimile Reproductions (Fukusei) of Hokusai’s Prints in the Meiji Era (1868-1912)’
18. Andrew Hare, ‘A Technical Study of the Freer Version of Shell-Gathering at Low Tide (F1903.2)’
19. Stephanie Santschi, of Zurich, ‘Hokusai Beyond the Database: Transforming Digital Archives into a Complex Collaborative Research Environment’
20. Dominic Oldman, Diana Tanase and Cristina Giancristofaro, ‘Beyond the Catalogue’
Appendix 1 - Ellis Tinios, ‘A Chronological List of Late Hokusai Books with Short Bibliographic Notes’
Appendix 2 – Peter Morse and Roger Keyes, ‘List of Locations of Hokusai Prints, 1813−48’
Contributors
Bibliography
Index
