Katsushika Hokusai

The most internationally recognized master of the Edo-period Japanese woodblock print tradition, Hokusai worked in virtually every genre of ukiyo-e — actor prints, warrior scenes, erotic shunga, ghost stories, instruction manuals — before finding the subject that would make him a global icon in his old age: the landscape. He changed his artistic name more than thirty times across his life, each new name marking a deliberate break with what he had previously done. He liked to say his real work would only begin after his hundredth birthday; he died at eighty-eight. The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published as a series of woodblock prints beginning around 1831, when Hokusai was in his early seventies, contains The Great Wave off Kanagawa — by any measure one of the most reproduced images in the history of visual culture. The series combined the traditional Japanese subject of the sacred mountain with a new, dynamic compositional language partly influenced by Dutch engravings he had studied through Nagasaki trade channels. Printed in thousands of copies on cheap paper from carved cherrywood blocks, the prints were everyday consumer items, not luxury objects — which is precisely why they traveled so widely. His work arrived in Europe packed in crates as wrapping material for porcelain exports in the 1850s and 1860s, and its visual language — asymmetric composition, flat color planes, bold cropping, lines that describe motion — struck Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec like a revelation. The resulting Japonisme craze reshaped Western painting, graphic design and decorative arts for decades. Hokusai's final known work, a sketch of a tiger made the morning he died, was dated and signed 'this old man at ninety.'