Masters of Art - Katsushika Hokusai

by Katsushika Hokusai

  His colour cannot be praised so unreservedly. During his youth and early manhood the colour instinct of the Japanese popular painters reached its climax in the hands of Harunobu, Hokusai’s own master Shunsho, and Utamaro. The climax was as short-lived as it was extraordinary, for by the beginning of the nineteenth century Japanese colour had fallen from its supreme perfection of elaborate harmony to the vulgar violence of Toyokuni and his followers. Hokusai, who had imitated Shunsho and Utamaro with considerable success while their influence was predominant, had too much independence to rush to the opposite extreme when it became fashionable. The greens and crimsons and purples that clash so violently in the work of Toyokuni were subdued and modified by him till they ceased to be discordant, and combine into harmonies that are certainly pleasant if not exactly noble. It was not, however, till the revolt against popular convention was made a certain success by the publication of the Mangwa that he ventured upon the elaborate prints in colour on which his fame of to-day rests.

  Compared with the efforts of his contemporaries, with the occasional exception of Hiroshige, the result is masterly; yet it will not stand comparison in every respect with the best work of eighteenth-century Japan any more than his drawing, just because it is not conventional, quite catches certain delicate graces of Utamaro’s best work. The colours in Hokusai’s five great series — the Thirty-six Views, the Bridges, the Waterfalls, the Flowers, and the Hundred Poems — are delightful from their frankness and purity rather than from any complex subtlety. From his treatise on colouring it is evident that the quality of the pigments he used was the matter which interested him most; and it is therefore exceedingly important that he should be judged only by fine old proofs and not by the modern reprints now so common, in which the colours are coarse and muddy.

  The result of his simple tastes is evident in all his finer plates. The combinations and contrasts of colour are quite in harmony with the characteristic features of his design — at once fresh and massive, though his preference for a hot, ferreous red is apt to be rather overwhelming when it is not contrasted with a corresponding amount of cool pigment. If Plate XI. be compared with Plate XIV. it will be seen how, in the case of the mountain scene, the masses of deep blue are strong enough to balance the hot colour, while, in the case of the waterfall, the red rocks are unduly predominant. It should be added, in fairness to Hokusai, that the latter proof, though old, is not in all probability one of those printed under his immediate supervision. At the same time, his paintings show clearly enough that in later life this taste for hot colour became habitual. After all, it is only because Hokusai is one of a nation of colourists that his gifts in this respect seem limited. How few works, for instance, of our own water-colour school could be placed beside his prints without looking weak or crude or dirty? Though he fails to equal such men as Harunobu or Utamaro in certain respects, it is because in those respects Harunobu and Utamaro are supreme, and because they paid for their supremacy by sacrificing almost everything else to it.

  If the Japanese are by nature a nation of colourists, they are a nation of designers as well, and designers with a very marked aptitude for exquisite grace and delicacy, but perhaps rather too happy and facile to achieve the majestic. Among the earlier artists, the lacquerer Korin alone seems to have stiffened the sweetness of his country with a proportionate measure of strength, though occasionally the Kano school in their imitation of Chinese design chance upon some dignified motive. During the first forty years of his life Hokusai is Japanese to the core, graceful, fluent, versatile, capricious, but rarely grave or grand. The enthusiastic industry that made him, as we have seen, a student in turn of all the available styles of art, led in due course to an imitation of Korin and then of the painters of the mainland. Now, as far as art was concerned, China was to Japan what Egypt was to Greece — the square, massive masculine element that gave to the fluent, lively graces of the maritime nation the grit and backbone that it needed. Hokusai was not slow to realise this. The first result of the new knowledge was the blending of sweetness with power that makes the figures of the Mangwa so precious. By 1830, when his enthusiasm for landscape was at its height, the Chinese influence had become part of his being, till, when he worked upon the hero books, his design has an angular force through which Japanese graces peep but rarely. As the peculiarities of their execution in these latter cannot be examined without a study of the mannerisms of Chinese painting, there is no space to discuss them adequately here. It will therefore be best to confine our attention to the design of Hokusai’s middle period, when the characteristics of the mainland and of the artist’s own island are most perfectly blended.

  Europe has so long been dominated by the sober ideas of composition that are associated with the names of Raphael and Claude that it has still to become accustomed to the less restrained balance of form and colour that pleases the Oriental eye. We are apt to pity Rembrandt and to despise Goya when they are original enough to pass beyond the limits imposed by academic pedants, so that we are hardly ready to view fairly the more constant divergence of the Japanese. Yet it is undeniable that the old formulae have produced nothing but dulness and pomposity with all but the greatest of our artists. The very moderation that the balancing of one thing by another implies, the search for a succession of points of interest, do not really make for strength but for weakness. The tendency of minds with no definite original purpose is to touch up all subordinate objects till they cease to be subordinate, and the main point gets lost in a tangle of competing interests. Even Hokusai is occasionally so fond of some small detail of gesture or character that he is apt to make it unduly obtrusive, but rarely so far as to interfere with the real central thought. Anyone who examines even the few compositions reproduced in this volume will be able to tell at a glance the real motive underlying them. A great wave, a great waterfall, a great bridge, a great mountain, a great figure, — whatever he wants to emphasise, — he sees without a distracting environment, and means that there shall be no doubt about it. His design, in fact, instead of being eccentric is unusually direct and simple.

  This simplicity, this avoidance of anything like equal quantities, really lies at the root of Hokusai’s artistic dignity. When he wishes to make anything look high he places it high up on the page, not only because this conveys the impression of its being far above the spectator’s horizon, but also because an exceedingly unequal division of the page at once attracts attention to the larger mass.

  So he conveys the impression of space, and suggests a vast environment, unseen in the actual picture, by letting the lines of the composition run out of it freely so that they appear to be unlimited, in contrast to the Western notion that everything must be strictly confined within the picture space, and that the corners must be rounded off or merged in shadow. If a study of Hokusai did no more than deal the deathblow of the vignette, that emasculate heresy which has for two centuries been the refuge of the tradesman and the dunce, it would confer upon European painters the boon that they need most.

  Hokusai’s taste for Chinese methods often leads him into an imitation of their forcible angular handling that tends to make individual parts of his work look fussy. Fortunately he combines with this taste the national love for exquisitely spaced straight lines and long sweeping contours, that form its most perfect complement. Indeed, in the hands of his predecessors, the harmonies of gentle curves and straight lines were become as languid as their colour, and Hokusai’s jagged brush-work was just what was wanted to revive the national style. European painters too often design with small curves, and have only half understood that the perfect spacing of straight lines which makes fine architecture or fine furniture can also go a long way towards making fine pictures. Anyone who has studied the more abstract side of the art of Greece or of pre-Raphaelite Italy will see, if he only looks carefully enough, that the principles underlying such a design as that in the second volume of the Hundred Views, where Fuji is seen behind the vertical lines of a dyer’s goods hung out to d
ry, are identical with those that were felt by the great vase painters and by Donatello. As one turns over the leaves of the volume, and comes across design after design all wonderful, and all utterly distinct from each other, it is impossible not to be struck by the hopelessness of attempting to explain more than the one or two points that force themselves most definitely on the mind. Reproductions, however carefully done, always interpose a screen of some kind between artist and spectator. In the case of bad painters this is an advantage; in the case of great men it can never be anything but a misfortune. Unluckily, fine Japanese prints, owing to the yellowish tone of the paper, defy photography, so that the little engravings annexed can convey only a slight idea of their originals. — Only by actual examination of the master’s work can any idea be formed of the extraordinary variety of experiments which he turns into triumphs. So universal, indeed, is the achievement of Hokusai, that the painter who can learn nothing from a careful study of his prints must either be unfit for his trade, or a greater genius than any the world has hitherto known.

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