Page 44 - Studio International - September 1967
P. 44
Hokusai after the cult
Jack Hillier
The cult of Hokusai has passed through a number of tic stimuli, how they determine who are their great
phases since its inception in Paris in the 1860s. Hokusai artists, (indeed, we can hardly answer those questions
was, in fact, the first Japanese artist to impinge on the unanimously in regard to our own western art) ; but the
west, and when it became fashionable to talk of Japanese tendency certainly at the time of the first contact was to
art, his name was bandied about by many who had no respond to two factors in their art which could obviously
chance to learn of others. So, to begin with, he was feted have no bearing on the Japanese estimation—first, its
as the greatest of Japanese artists, which was a distortion exoticism, its depiction of a world where costume, custom
of the truth: he was the Japanese artist who made most and people were strange and alluring; and second, its
appeal to the west, a very different thing. close correspondence, in some aspects, to the notions of
No-one so far has dared to undertake a study of how far art then currently valid in the west.
we really understand what the Japanese themselves Hokusai's colour-prints, especially the landscapes in
react to in their art, what for them constitute the aesthe- which nature was subordinated to the requirements of
the medium and reduced to simple outline and broad
masses of three or four colours, were often beyond the
taste of the gallery-going public, (although there was
Oni shielding his head
ink on paper always a minority who admired and understood their
significance, it was much later that the 'Red Fuji' and the
12 x 6¾ in.
`Kirifuri Waterfall' and prints of that order became
widely accepted) : but Hokusai's ink brush-drawings, in a
medium that was that of Rembrandt or Goya, were
immediately acceptable and praised with a fervour that
often has the curiously brittle ring of the hysterical cult-
devotee. George Moore, for example, wrote 'In all sin-
cerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the Japanese
in Japan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one
drawing by Hokusai'.
Since that first period of wild hyperbole, when de Gon-
court, Moore and others like them became protagonists
of Hokusai as much, one suspects sometimes, to advertise
their own avant-garde tastes as from any real conviction
on artistic grounds, there has been a succession of exhi-
bitions of his work and of other Japanese artists and a
steady issue of literature with reproductions. In the last
sixty or seventy years during which knowledge has
grown, there have been the most fundamental changes in
our western concepts of art—changes to which Japan,
and especially Hokusai, contributed to an indefinable but
none-the-less positive degree. The outcome has been that
each successive generation has been conditioned to look
at Hokusai's drawings afresh, and today we ask not only
what artistic validity they have for us, but also seek
what they had for our forebears. Any new exhibition is
an opportunity for consulting drawings which, in the
sense that they can be viewed as touchstones to test the
artistic sensibilities of the west since Impressionism, are
indispensable documents in the history of art and taste;
but they are of course far more than that: they are works
of art that acquire new meaning and beauty as the
vantage-ground from which we view them changes. The
exhibition at the d'Offay Fine Art gallery, thoughtfully