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
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