The Living Line: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings by Hokusai
San Diego Museum of Art
May 24 - August 3, 2003
This exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art demonstrates the genius of Japan's most celebrated and prolific artist, Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849). The Living Line: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings by Hokusai presents a fine selection of 22 original drawings and paintings from the collection of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena alongside a selection of 37 prints from SDMA's collection.
A master of the brush and a skilled draftsman, Hokusai was an extremely versatile artist producing over 30,000 sketches, paintings, and print designs during his lifetime. The adopted son of a mirror maker, he was born in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). He apprenticed as a woodblock engraver at the age of fourteen, a training rare for Japanese artists at the time, but one which proved invaluable to him later.
By the age of eighteen, Hokusai was already designing kabuki actor prints with celebrated artist, Shunsho Katsukawa (1726-1793). During this time, he became associated with the ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") school of painting, which was renowned for capturing scenes of everyday life in a realistic way. For the next twenty years, Hokusai designed ukiyo-e prints, book illustrations, and fine, limited-edition color prints known as surimono. Towards the end of his long life, he concentrated his artistic efforts on painting, signing many of his works Gakyo rojin, "Old Man Mad-with-Painting."
Fascinated by all types of painting, Hokusai studied Chinese and Western painting techniques, including vanishing-point perspective. After 1820, he began to produce his most famous series of woodblock prints: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1829-1833) and the Waterfalls series (1831-1832). Selections from both series are presented in this exhibition in addition to pages from Hokusai's One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834-1835), a three-volume collection of monochrome prints. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji marked the beginning of Hokusai's courtship of the great mountain; One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (undertaken immediately thereafter) testifies to his ambitious effort to capture Fuji from every significant vantage point and every telling context.
Although Hokusai Katsushika would go on to achieve international fame through his woodcuts, the original drawings and paintings from the Pacific Asia Museum included in this exhibition provide a rare, intimate, and immediate look at this artist's versatile hand, the source of some of the most recognizable and moving images of the people and landscapes of Japan.
SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART
1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA
