Hokusai

Hokusai's Mount Fuji: The Complete Views in Color

This complete collection of HokusaiÂ’s famous views of Mount Fuji is the only high-quality reproduction of these engravings, long considered the Japanese masterÂ’s greatest works. Taken from the best engravings available and shown in splendid color, this authoritative volume is the first of its kind since 1830. HokusaiÂ’s influence extended far beyond Japan, even to French Impressionists including Degas, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Each illustration is accopmanied by detailed notes placing the work in its cultural and historical context and exploring the symbolic themes running through HokusaiÂ’s landscapes.

Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai (1769-1849) was one of the greatest of the Japanese printmakers, painters and book illustrators. This richly illustrated monograph provides an overview of the master's life and works. Comprising introductory essays, seven chapters embracing Hokusai's entire career and some 700 illustrations, it presents and analyses a large selection of Hokusai's finest works in all media, covering his whole career and giving a scholarly and up-to-date interpretation of the artist and his significance.Gian Carlo Calza is Professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Ca' Foscari, Venice, and Director of the International Hokusai Research Centre in Milan. A distinguished authority on Hokusai and Japanese art, he has published many books, exhibition catalogues and articles on Hokusai, and is currently preparing a catalogue raisonn+ of Hokusai's paintings.In addition to Calza's eight introductory essays and his catalogue of the artist's works, the book includes discussions of various aspects of Hokusai's art by inter-nationally respected authorities in the field, namely Roger S. Keyes, Visiting Professor in the History of Art at Brown University; Matthi Forrer, Curator at the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden; John M. Rosen-field, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Art at Harvard University; Richard Lane, independent scholar; Asano Shugo, Curator of the Municipal Museum of Art, Chiba; Tsuji Nobuo, Rector of Tama University of Fine Arts, Tokyo; and Kobayashi Tadashi, Director of the Muni-cipal Museum of Art, Chiba, and Professor of East Asian Art History at the University Gakushuin of Tokyo.

Hiroshige and Hokusai: Japanese Woodblock Prints 2009 Engagement Calendar

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 1858) were the greatest makers of ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world. Among the thirty-two woodcuts in this calendar are selections from these artists most prized series, such as Hiroshige s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and Hokusai s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Also included: 54 weekly grids, 12 full-page monthly grids, a brief essay about the artists, lists of international holidays and international calling codes/time differences, 2009 and 2010 yearly grids, pages for notes, and a personal information page.

Published with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Size: 6 5/8 x 8 in.; 112 pages; hardcover Wire-O bound.

Hokusai, First Manga Master

More than a hundred years before Japanese comics swept the globe, the master engraver Hokusai was producing beautiful, surreal, and often downright wacky sketches and drawings, filled with many of the characters and themes found in modern manga. These out-of-context caricatures, which include studies of facial expressions, postures, and situations ranging from the mundane to the otherworldly, demonstrate both the artistÂ’s style and his taste. In addition to the landscapes for which he is beloved, HokusaiÂ’s mangas reveal his compassion for farmers, artisans, and peasants, as well as his keen eye for the absurd.

Araki meets Hokusai

This catalog presents for the first time photographs of the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki in combination with classical Japanese woodcuts from the Hanoverian collection of Michael Thun, which belong to the best of their type to be found anywhere in Europe.

Approximately one hundred current photographs, never exhibited before, from Araki's notorious Bondage series are presented together with small-format woodcuts. Upon closer inspection, the woodcuts reveal only slightly concealed allusions to erotic desire and sexuality. It is not only where sexual activities may be seen that Araki's spiritual affinity with his artistic ancestors becomes clear.

In essence, Araki's photographs are always more than blatant provocation through naked skin and exposed bodily orifices. They are in fact stagings of individualized fantasies and culturally inherited images whose protagonists are placed in a manner similar to the traditional procedure by the masters of woodcuts with their pictorial figures-whether in the prints of Hokusai, Ukiyo-e, Kunisada, or Shin Hanga.

Born in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki is arguably Japan's greatest living photographer, and certainly its most controversial. His inexhaustible creative energy is attested to by the more than three hundred books he has published in the last four decades, while his work, which often challenges social taboos surrounding sex and death, has drawn critical attention both at home and abroad. Araki has been called a monster, a pornographer, and a genius-and the photographer quite agrees.

Hokusai: Mountains and Water, Flowers and Birds (Pegasus Series)

This delightful selection of prints depicting nineteenth century JapanÂ’s natural beauty is a colorful introduction to the countryÂ’s most beloved artist.

The Japanese artist Hokusai spent the second half of his life sketching and painting with tremendous energy nearly everything he saw, and this book focuses on one of his most productive periods, when the artist was in his seventies. This volume of full-color reproductions features fifty works of the artistÂ’s astonishing oeuvre. The book includes selections from his renowned series of woodblock prints, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including "In the Hollow of a Wave," "Shower below the Summit," and "South Wind at Clear Dawn." Also presented here are images of flowers, waterfalls, bridges, birds, and fish, demonstrating the uniquely precise yet passionate quality of HokusaiÂ’s art. An expert on the artistÂ’s work, Matthi Forrer provides illuminating commentary on HokusaiÂ’s life and technique, offering revealing insight into his enduring popularity in Japan and throughout the world.

Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji

One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji by the renowned Japanese artist Hokusai is a work of unending visual delight. Considered Hokusai's masterpiece, this series of images captures the simple, elegant shape of Mount Fuji from every angle and in every context. With no more than delicate, engraved outlines and flat washes of gray, Hokusai displays his consummate virtuosity as a draftsman, printmaker, and compositional innovator. Seen behind hanging strips of cloth outside a dyer's shop, or through the close stems of swaying bamboo, Mt. Fuji takes on a variety of guises--at times majestic, ominous, and even occasionally comic--to reflect its multiform meaning within Japanese culture.

Hokusai One Hundred Poets

This lavishly illustrated, oversized (17" x 10") book brings together the last major print series of the celebrated Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) and the Japanese poetry that inspired these beautiful prints.

Whether showing semi-nude women abalone divers struggling with their catch while a male crew of shriveled old salts leers from a nearby boat, or the carefree rapture of a leisurely group of men and women observing cherry blossoms at their peak, Hokusai captures, with drama and delicacy, sublime and ridiculous states. The artist's simplicity, though deceptive, is also remarkable: he illustrates a poem about a lovers' seaside tryst with a magnificently imposing yet unadorned sailing vessel, its small window offering a coy glimpse of the fortunate couple inside.

Each of the 111 color prints (as well as 41 black-and-white sketches of projected prints apparently never completed) is accompanied by the poem, in Japanese and English, a biographical note on the poet and by Peter Morse's comments on literary and artistic intention and execution.

Hokusai: Genius of the Japanese Ukiyo-e

Hokusai is perhaps the Asian artist best known in the West. His influence has extended from the Impressionists to later modern art and even to commercial design. A few of his works are so frequently reproduced that they are almost as familiar as the face of the Mona Lisa. Yet the "Great Wave" and the "Red Fuji" from the Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji represent only a tiny action of Hokusai's output. The pages of the Sketches, with their teeming humanity and their boundless interest in the details of everyday life, give only a small idea of his true scope. Hokusai's life was characterized by a prodigious energy and productivity that continued to the end of his ninth decade; his output comprises a correspondingly broad variety of genres and styles. Despite this, it is still not sufficiently realized just how great is the range, and how many masterpieces it includes.
The bold compositions and the grasp of essentials seen in the Thirty-six Views find their counterpart in the masterly monochromes of the One Hundred views of Mt. Fuji. Against the daring simplifications of these works may be set the elaborate refinement and delicacy seen in many of the surimono prints and books of illustrated verse. The brilliant coloring and decorative qualities of Hokusai's brush paintings of beautiful women and legendary subjects are rivalled by the unsurpassed skill in ink drawing found in the best of his book illustrations, some of which are masterpieces in their own right.
Even the flower-and-bird series and the albums of sketches from life, which might seem to represent essentially minor genres, provide at their best a sense of color and inventiveness of composition that rival those of Hokusai's landscapes. On the oilier hand, the interest in human beings and in genre subjects is not confined to the Sketches and some of the Thirty-six Views, but is apparent again and again in the art manuals, the book illustrations, and even in a late print series such as the Nurse's Illustrated Hyakunin Isshu.
There are religious pictures and pictures of children and sumo wrestlers; experiments with Western perspective and with various combinations of style, whether Japanese, Chinese, or Western; moods ranging from the elegant to the earthy, from the lightly fanciful to the heavily grotesque. Even in his very last years, Hokusai's unflagging energy was taking him into new realms reaching beyond the ukiyo-e proper.
The aim of this work is to present a more balanced picture of Hokusai's achievement, a selection ranging over the whole oeuvre that will give some idea of the strength, the delicacy, and the fabulous inventive powers of this truly universal genius of the ukiyo-e.

Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection, Honolulu Academy of Arts