The Great Wave by Hokusai

In today’s episode, we travel to the Art Institute of Chicago for a long look at this iconic print by Japanese artist, Hokusai.

You might remember from the Van Gogh episode that when French artists discovered colorful Japanese woodblock prints like this, it started the enormously popular Japonisme trend and eventually led to Impressionism. 

But influence went both ways. In today’s episode, we’ll find out how a lab accident in Berlin led to Hokusai showcasing this vivid Prussian blue 130 years later.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas

Episode theme is “La Mer – 3 – Dialogue du vent et de la mer” composed by Claude Debussy. Performed by the US Air Force Band. Courtesy of musopen.org

Artwork information 
https://www.artic.edu/articles/743/seeing-triple-the-great-wave-by-hokusa

Hokusai bio
https://www.katsushikahokusai.org/biography.html

Ukiyo-e printing

Experience Japanese Culture: Making The Great Wave: A Demonstration of Japanese Woodblock Printing (YouTube)

https://risingsunprints.com/blogs/introduction-to-ukiyo-e/explained-the-traditional-process-of-japanese-woodblock-printing

Prussian blue story
Prussian Blue: From the Great Wave to Starry Night, How a Pigment Changed the World

Post comments or questions at alonglookpodcast.com

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? This season, we’ll be doing this virtually, at museums with great online resources. 

So join me for a long look at the Art Institute of Chicago!

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at The Great Wave by Hokusai. 

If you want to follow along, you can find it at https://alonglookpodcast.com/wave

So what do you first notice? 

Looking right to left, two butter yellow boats with tall pointed prows ride the troughs of a violent sea filling the bottom half of the scene. The first swoops down a crest starting halfway up the right side, heading right towards a snarling wave towering up the left side of the image, curling just short of the top edge. Further left, near the center, the second sits in a trough near the bottom edge, about to be slammed by another cresting wave. 

Eight members of each crew huddle along the sides near the stern. They sit low, hunched over and leaning over the sides looking backwards. Four face us and the other four face the other way. Their heads are just circles outlined in blue and the ones facing us have dots and dashes suggesting eyes and a mouth. A few more crew members sit near the bow. 

Some kind of long grey object hangs over the side of the boats near the prow. It has two thick horizontal blue lines runnings its length and several short vertical lines above and below those. One of the side below the crews are crisscrossed blue lines that might be fishing nets.

As I keep looking left, I discover a third boat in a trough between two waves. Only the front half is visible but instead of seeing it from the side, it’s tilted towards us, so we see it from above. We’re looking down on the deck and a couple figures huddled in the open cockpit. It’s not yellow like the others, just white and grey with thin blue strokes delineating the planks and four grey objects lying on the deck.

All this energy feeds the great wave towering way above everything else. Its foamy tendrils look like claws, reaching out to threaten these vessels and their crews. They’re delineated with thin outlines of blue with curving light blue shadows underneath. Gobs of white foam rain down from its peak, it almost looks like falling snow. 

Its rising curve is accentuated by a medium grey area streaking in from under its crest, angling down towards and behind the conical shape of Mt. Fuji sitting just off center. The sacred mountain sits low and small in the background, its famous, snow-covered peak rising just behind the prow of the first boat.  

In contrast to the ferocious water is the delicate petal pink sky filling the upper quarter of the scene. Its lower edge undulates in random, uneven curves and Hokusai cleverly uses the light paper color to suggest clouds rising behind the swelling water on the right. 

There are two vertical rows of Japanese script in the upper left corner. One floats on the pink shade while the other is enclosed in a rectangular border. 

The blue he uses is a deep, rich color called Prussian blue. He uses it almost everywhere–on the water, the sailors garments, even the base of Mt. Fuji. Hokusai built the waves by layering wide, rounded dark stripes of it over lighter layers that curve upwards, curling sharply at the crest. Imagine an elongated comma and you’ll get the idea. 

On the right side, the swells are mostly defined by areas of light blue layered with strokes of medium blue and dark blue. But as the waves grow and curl back towards us from left to right, those strokes become darker. 

One of the cool things he does is using unpainted areas of the paper to represent the white foam of the waves, the snow-covered mountain peak, the heads of the sailors and the rising clouds. Their shapes are all created by those thin outlines.

All this drama is packed into a pretty small size, it’s only 10 inches by 14 inches, a little smaller than legal size paper.

So, what’s the deal with all this blue?

MUSIC

Prussian blue aka Berlin blue, was invented—by accident—in Berlin by a scientist named Johann Jacob Diesbach. He had intended to make a red pigment but accidently mixed in a new oil invented by his labmate, Conrad Dippel. The result was this amazing rich color. 130 years later, it became available in Japan and artists loved it. Hokusai was one of the first to really showcase it like this. 

Katsushika Hokusai lived and worked in Japan in the 1800s and created this print between 1830-1833. “The Great Wave” was part of his “Thirty Six View of Mount Fuji,” his most famous series of prints. Mt. Fuji was sacred in Japanese culture and Japanese travelers who made pilgrimages to it bought these prints as souvenirs. 

Prints like this took four people to make. First was the publisher who would commission the works and sell the prints. Next the artist would create the drawings, making one for each color he wanted to include. The carver would carve each drawing onto a separate wood block and there could be up to 20 blocks for some images! Finally the printer would ink each block and carefully line up the paper face down so each color landed in the right place. Then he’d rub a round pad on the back of paper to transfer the ink. 

I found a great video demonstration which I’ll include in the show notes.

Hokusai became famous for these ukiyo-e images featuring landscapes, which were something new. Ukiyo-e is a Buddhist phrase meaning floating world and the idea is that pleasure is temporary, fleeting. But it took on a positive spin, encouraging people to enjoy life to the fullest. So artists began creating woodblock prints celebrating actors and courtesans of the pleasure districts. These “pictures of the floating world” were affordable to regular people, not just the elite and became enormously popular. 

However, by the time he started this series, the government was beginning to censor art on moral and political grounds so artists switched from showing celebrities to landscapes.

“The Great Wave” was painted when Hokusai was 70, near the end of his long career. Part of what kept him going was his passion for learning and experimenting. He worked in a lot of styles in all kinds of mediums–illustrated books, multicolor woodblock prints like this, and ink drawings. All of this added up to at least 30,000 drawings and illustrations. He called himself, “the old man, mad with painting!” 

Fun fact! Composer Claude Debussey was such a fan of this image, he even wrote an orchestral work called La Mer, the sea. You’ve been hearing some of it today!

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. And you’ll find links to follow A Long Look there, too!

Have a question or comment? Let me know! You can comment after each post or email me at alonglookpodcast[at]gmail[dot]com.

Thanks for joining me!