Hokusai At MFA, Boston: More Than A Great Wave

Type “wave” into your smartphone and a Great Wave replica emoji pops up. Not even Mona Lisa has that!

The Great Wave has a LEGO set.

A Google search for “Hokusai Great Wave” brings back 3.6 million results, same as “Michelangelo Sistine Chapel.”

Almost everyone, whether they realize it or not, has seen Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as the Great Wave. You’ve seen it on a tote bag or a coffee mug or a sweater or socks or a poster, and from March 26 through July 16, 2023, you can see the real thing, an original print version, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston during its exhibition, “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence.”

Of the thousands of images Hokusai produced during his lifetime, of the millions of examples of Asian art seen in the West, what is it about the Great Wave that has made it the most famous example of Asian art to Western audiences?

“Insofar as I can give you a short answer, I would say lots of different reasons, and that’s why,” Sarah Thompson, curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, told Forbes.com. “I think one of the reasons is that it means many different things to different people. Images in general that are a big hit often have something mysterious about them, or something that you can interpret in different ways, and that’s definitely true of the Great Wave.”

Good point.

Mona Lisa has that mystery. So does Velasquez’ Las Maninas; Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as well.

“To start with, are those guys in the boats going to survive or not? You can see it as a disaster or a story of triumph and survival depending on how you look at it,” Thompson said. “It’s very beautiful, but also very scary. Today, very often, people see it used in a metaphorical way with reference to manmade disasters, climate change. You also often see a kind of emotional interpretation, feelings of being overwhelmed.”

An entire room of the exhibition is devoted to the Great Wave with the genuine artwork presented with other works related to it.

“When it was first published in Japan, of course people liked it, but they liked all the prints in the series. We don’t have any evidence that that one was particularly admired,” Thompson explains. “It seems to have risen to the top probably in the 1890s in France. That was where people really started talking about it and singing its praises and then it kind of snowballed and continues to the present day.”

Japan’s borders were effectively opened to the world in 1853. By the early 1870s and extending through most of the rest of the 19^th century, France, Paris in particular, then the cultural capital of the Western world, experienced a wave of Japonisme–a craze for all things Japanese.

The MFA possesses perhaps the finest example of French Japonisme, Claude Monet’s La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) from 1876. Van Gogh was obsessed with Japanese prints and collected them with his meager finances.

Greatness Beyond Great Wave

While predominantly known today for Great Wave, Hokusai was no one-hit wonder.

“The Great Wave itself was part of a series of prints; it’s one of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Japanese, Edo period, about 1830–31)–there are actually 46 in the set because it was such a hit that he made 10 extra,” Thompson said. “That series was actually the second great hit of his lifetime. He was already in his 70s when he designed the Fuji prints.”

Hokusai’s first great career success came 20 years prior with a series of instructional drawing picture books known in Japan as Hokusai manga. That translates as “Hokusai sketchbooks.” Those sketchbooks filled with drawings of people, animals, plants, imaginary beings, landscapes, architectural studies–you name it, Hokusai could draw it, and expertly–made him a household name in Japan in his own time.

“They were supposed to be model books for people who wanted to (learn to) draw,” Thompson explains of the massive, 10 volume series of which five more would be published posthumously. “He himself was not the one who initiated the publication, it was his devoted students who gathered together the drawings that he had done as models for them to copy, they collated it and prepared it for publication.”

The books’ imagery proved so popular a general audience gobbled them up along with those seeking instruction.

Then there were the ghosts!

“He was very imaginative and he loved dreaming up ghosts and monsters,” Thompson said. “He did a very famous color print series, there are only five, but they’re all really striking of ghosts.”

The Ghost of Oiwa (Oiwa‑san), from the series One Hundred Ghost Stories (Hyaku monogatari), produced in about 1831–32, could be straight out of a horror movie.

“That’s a very famous print, very menacing, everyday things like lanterns suddenly become this terrifying face,” Thompson said. “It’s the ghost of a murdered woman who comes back to haunt her evil husband who killed her and ordinary everyday things all around him, such as lanterns, turn into ghosts–she’s haunting him everywhere.”

Katsushika Ōi

Surprisingly, for such a famous artist, considerable gaps exist in Hokusai’s biography. His exact number of children nor the names of his wives are known with certainty. Nothing is known about his birth family, only about the uncle who adopted him.

One daughter, Katsushika Ōi (1800-1866), would follow in his footsteps and become a great artist in her own right. Examples of her artwork are included in “Inspiration and Influence.”

Like her father, not much is known about her life outside of her art. What trickles down through history comes via anecdotes.

“People who’ve written about her, I think, almost kind of invent their own version of her,” Thompson said. “She’s a very good artist and she’s a lot like her father. There are all these stories, not so much what they were like as artists, but apparently, neither of them really liked doing housework. They both just wanted to draw and paint all the time, that was all they were really interested in. They would get takeout food from restaurants and leaves the dirty dishes lying around.”

A popular story told about Hokusai, whether it’s true or not matters little, centers around a painting contest between himself and the shogun’s official painter. After both artists completed a few paintings, Hokusai announced he was going to do one more.

“He took a long strip of paper and just painted a streak of blue across it,” Thompson shares with delight. “Then he went to the basket that he brought with him and took out a live chicken! He dipped its feet in red paint and let it run across the streak of blue and announced that he had just painted Maple Leaves Floating on the Tatsuta River–it’s a landscape scene, very famous for beautiful maple leaves. We have no idea if it’s really true, or if it was just a good story; I like to think it was really true.”

Aside from artistic invention, the story shares insight into the man, his humor and humility.

“(Hokusai) got out of this awkward situation where, of course he wanted to win the painting contest, but he also did not want to antagonize the shogun’s chief painter, who’s the most important person in his profession and he’d like to stay on good terms with him,” Thompson explained. “Being clever rather than being the winner might be the way to go.”