Hokusai at NGV Melbourne shows gems of Japanese ukiyo-e

All the effects of Japanese ukiyo-e prints are beautifully exemplified in the work of Katsushika Hokusai.

Katsushika Hokusai’s South wind, clear sky (Red Fuji) (1830–34).

Art does not arise from disembodied thoughts but out of particular media and materials. In fact when we speak of aesthetic ideas, we are referring to ideas that are inseparable from feeling and even the sensory world, which are at the core of the meaning of the word aesthetic itself.

Thus a painter’s ideas develop out of handling paint, and even particular kinds of paint: the oil painter and the fresco painter do not think aesthetically in the same way, just as the carver and the modeller imagine the world differently. Subject and genre are also important. A still life painter such as Giorgio Morandi thinks through the arrangement of bottles and jars, while a landscape painter’s ideas arise out of the encounter with nature.

From the perspective of the viewer, in the same way, the aesthetic effect of a work is inseparable from its material form. A painting is not just an image of something but a pattern of pigments on a flat surface, a set of marks that can articulate the work’s constructive logic or affective engagement with its subject.

Printmaking is a particularly good illustration of this principle because the material process is so elaborate and may entail many steps before the final impression. Unlike a painting, which is built up progressively, prints involve lengthy preparation in advance, while the final impression is made in a single moment. That singularity and wholeness of the printed image is fundamental to its aesthetic appeal.

The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji; The Amida Falls in the far reaches of the Kisokaido Road

But each variety of printmaking will have its own particular resources and effects, from woodblock to engraving, from etching to aquatint. And Japanese woodblock is a complex and refined technique, employing multiple blocks for different hues. In Europe, multiple woodblocks were used only in a limited way, and only in monochrome, for the chiaroscuro woodcuts of the 16th century. Multiple colour blocks were not really used until the rise of colour linocuts, in a much simplified imitation of the Japanese practice, early in the 20th century.

In the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition, the artist would work with specialist block cutters, designing each image from the outset with the constraints of the woodblock medium in mind, which meant broadly conceiving the design in black outlines and flat colour areas.

The first thing the woodcutter had to do was to produce a key-block, which comprised the underlying black outline of the design. A copy of the black outline drawing was glued facedown to the block, and the paper moistened and rubbed away to leave the black ink outline on the block. The wood around that outline was then carefully cut out to leave only the outline standing, in reverse.

This block was then inked and produced the black outline of the design, now the right way around again. This first block would remain the first one used in the final printing process, but it was also employed to make further blocks for each of the colours to be used in the composition. The area that was to print as red, for example, would be determined and the rest of that block was cut away so only that section printed.

The result is a particular aesthetic effect in which forms are articulated in thin black outlines and areas of colour are printed as primarily flat. There is no modelling of the kind used in Western painting, or even in Western printmaking techniques such as engraving and etching. Part of the appeal of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, in fact, is the tension between often dramatic perspective effects, borrowed from Western art, and the flatness of individual forms.

All of these effects are beautifully exemplified in the work of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), one the greatest exponents of this art form, who in the course of his long career, and following Kitagawa Utamaro, helped to raise the coloured woodblock print from the status of a popular medium to something that could be enjoyed by the most refined connoisseurs.

Hokusai’s famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c.1830).

The National Gallery of Victoria had the foresight to acquire some important pieces by Hokusai as early as 1909, including the famous Great Wave, and has continued to build its collection since then. For this exhibition additional works have been borrowed from the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto. The exhibition thus includes 176 works, including complete sets of the 36 Views of Mount Fuji (1830-34), A Tour to the Waterfalls in Various Provinces (c. 1832), Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (c. 1832) and other series, and many further pieces from other series.

This is a beautiful and beautifully installed exhibition that will repay several visits, especially if you are interested in Japan or in woodblock printing. Even viewers who are relatively familiar with Hokusai’s work will find many unfamiliar images and will most likely never have seen the remarkable books of manga illustrations in which the artist seemed to pour out an overflowing creative energy and imagination throughout his life.

There are early books filled with endless variations on actions and postures, with figures working, exercising or simply playing the fool; and there is a final series of six volumes devoted to the life of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, with 35 elaborate illustrations, completed when the artist, a devout Buddhist, was 85.

Perhaps the single greatest series remains the 36 Views of Mount Fuji, in which the famous volcano, with its elegant profile and mystical associations, sometimes occupies the centre of attention, but at other times seems to withdraw into the background, discreetly anchoring compositions whose main focus may be on minor but picturesque incidents of contemporary life.

Thus the first view of Fuji we encounter is dominated by the massive form of the mountain, all in deep red, relieved by areas of cloud. But in others the focus seems to be on landscapes that are given shape and unity by its presence in the background; or again there may be buildings that we learn are Shinto shrines, recalling the importance of Mount Fuji in the ancient and native Japan­ese religious tradition.

Bunya no Asayasu (Fumiya no Asayasu) (1835–36).

One particularly beautiful wall is devoted to a group of the Fuji views that are all monochrome, printed in Prussian blue, the first synthetic pigment, invented in Germany at the start of the 18th century and a foreign import into a Japan still largely closed to the outside world. The original plan was to print the whole set of 36 views in this single pigment, but further colours were introduced in later plates.

If such monochrome printing is possible, it is partly because the same pigment can be used in different dilutions, but also because what was said about flat areas of colour needs to be qualified. As the pigments are hand-brushed on to each printing block, it is possible to vary the intensity of a colour: this is another quintessentially ukiyo-e aesthetic effect, the contrast between flat areas of colour and subtle gradations within the same area, an effect particularly used for skies.

One the most beautiful images in the Mount Fuji series, and certainly the most famous, is the print known as The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which the NGV was fortunate enough to acquire in its original purchase in 1909, for since then it has become enormously famous and corres­pond­ingly rare.

This print has been reproduced countless times and appropriated by numerous artists, including Brett Whiteley, and it was the subject of an episode of the BBC series Private Life of a Masterpiece (2014). It also has been the focus of a British Museum exhibition devoted to Hokusai, Beyond the Great Wave, which has just closed — sold out in its last weeks — in London.

The Melbourne exhibition includes two versions, the one that belongs to the NGV and one from the JUM. Both are fine impressions, but slight variations give an insight into the process and suggest the Melbourne impression is slightly earlier. An explanatory panel nearby suggests the initial print run for this image could have been of 2000 impressions or even more, of which the first 200 would have been of the highest quality, since the block becomes gradually worn. A slight difference in this respect can be seen between the two, although the most prominent difference is in the inking of the soft grey shadow at the horizon of the composition.

Aesthetically, the most remarkable things about this work are its bold composition, with the wave looming up on the left and the distant Mount Fuji standing impassively in the centre, and the stylisation of the water that turns the necessary linearity and flatness of the medium into an expressive advantage.

Two much earlier Hokusai prints of waves, in 1803 and 1805 — not in this exhibition — make the contrast clear: in these, the wave is frozen into hard forms, seeming to come up against the intractable, almost elemental incompatibility between fixed wooden outlines and the movement of water. Yet in The Great Wave, Hokusai manages to re-imagine the nature in water through the graphic medium of the woodcut, and the result, with all its necessary stylisation, is almost a more memorable aesthetic idea of water than a naturalistic rendering could be.

Inspired by this success, we can see that the artist was eager to tackle the subject of waterfalls, another example of watery subjects that may seem to be inherently alien to the linear form of the woodblock print. Again there are beautiful and surprising results as water turns into patterns that recall organic forms such as roots or fungi. And when we consider the oeuvre as a whole, we can admire everywhere the same principle of finding graphic equivalents in a difficult medium for subtle and sometimes ephemeral natural phenomena.

Hokusai was aware of the difficulty of what he was doing and knew how long it took to master so refined an art — or indeed to bring it to this level of refinement. He was well over 70 when he created the masterpieces of the Mount Fuji series and he believed he could continue to improve. As he wrote in a famous passage quoted as an epigraph to the exhibition’s outstanding catalogue: “At 73 I learnt a little about the real structure of nature … when I am eighty I shall have made more progress; at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things … when I am one hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”’’

Hokusai, NGV International, Melbourne, until October 15.