Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: Prussian Blue, Geometry and the Wave That Changed the World
A Breakthrough After Seventy: The Challenge of "the Old Man Mad About Painting"
A gigantic wave breaks with its claws outstretched as if seizing its prey, while beyond its fury the sacred peak of Mount Fuji stands calm and solitary. Katsushika Hokusai's (1760-1849) Under the Wave off Kanagawa, from his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, reaches far beyond the boundaries of Japanese art and is one of the most famous and widely quoted images in the world. Yet when this unprecedented series appeared, Hokusai was already over seventy.
He moved house more than ninety times, changed his art name more than thirty times and struggled with poverty and family misfortune, yet he never put down his brush. How was this old painter able to spark such a fresh and innovative visual revolution so late in life?
Hokusai called himself Gakyo Rojin Manji, "the Old Man Mad About Painting." Even in his eighties, he wrote that nothing he drew before seventy was worth noticing; that at seventy-three he had finally begun to understand the structure of animals and plants; and that at eighty he would progress further, at ninety master the secrets of art, at one hundred reach a divine level, and at one hundred and ten make every dot and line seem alive.
As the culmination of this tireless pursuit, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji began publication around 1830. It eventually grew to forty-six prints, with ten more added to the original thirty-six because the series was such a hit.
Until then, the main genres of ukiyo-e were bijinga, pictures of beautiful women such as the courtesans of Yoshiwara, and yakusha-e, portraits of kabuki actors. Pictures of famous places, showing mountains, rivers and highways, were treated as backgrounds or illustrated travel guides and were not highly regarded as art. Hokusai transformed the landscape print into an independent, first-rank artistic genre.
The Shock of Prussian Blue: A Revolution in Color
The greatest visual shock that Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji gave the people of Edo was its vivid, deep blue, a color that seemed to draw the viewer in and that had never existed in Japanese pictures before.
Traditionally, Japanese woodblock printers made blue from dayflower petals or from plant-based indigo. These organic dyes faded quickly in sunlight and air, often turning a dull brown, and they did not sit well on woodblocks, making it extremely difficult to print wide skies or deep seas evenly and beautifully.
Then, in the late 1820s, a new pigment began to arrive in Japan from Europe by way of China: Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment discovered by chance in Berlin in the early eighteenth century. In Edo it was called bero-ai, "Berlin blue," after the city where it was first made.
Bero-ai offered color strength, lightfastness and solubility in water that plant dyes could not match. Diluted, it became a pale, transparent sky blue; mixed densely, it became a deep ultramarine like the depths of the ocean. Hokusai recognized the potential of this new material before anyone else and used it generously throughout the series.
Early printings even experimented with aizuri, prints in which the outlines themselves were printed in Prussian blue rather than black ink, and the townspeople of Edo were thrilled by this cool, modern world of blue they had never seen before.
The choice of Prussian blue was not only the artist's personal preference but also a forward-looking business strategy by the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo). As the shogunate tightened restrictions on luxury goods on the eve of the Tenpo Reforms, Yohachi and Hokusai emphasized elegant, refined aizuri built on shades of blue rather than flashy multicolor printing. This let them avoid official crackdowns while appealing to wealthy, curious townspeople.
Behind their ability to use high-quality imported pigment lay the trade networks of Nagasaki and Edo's mature publishing market.
Geometry with Compass and Ruler: Circles, Triangles and Golden Proportions
The secret of the timeless strength of Hokusai's pictures lies in highly precise geometric composition that goes far beyond intuitive sketching.
In his 1812 drawing manual Ryakuga Hayaoshie, Hokusai explained his own theory of form: by drawing circles and straight lines with a ruler and compass, anyone can accurately depict everything in the universe. This geometric method was applied most perfectly in Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
Analyze Under the Wave off Kanagawa, for example, and you will find that the arc of the great wave curls in a spiral close to the golden spiral, calculated so that the distant Mount Fuji sits precisely at its center. The curves of the boats in the foreground, the spray of the crest and the triangle of Fuji in the background create sharp geometric contrasts of motion and stillness, large and small, arc and line.
In Fujimigahara in Owari Province, Hokusai created a bold frame-within-a-frame effect by placing the distant triangular Fuji inside the giant circular frame of a barrel being built by a cooper. In Fine Wind, Clear Morning, popularly known as Red Fuji, he stripped away every unnecessary detail and created a cosmic sense of scale using only the vast triangle of the mountain and the horizontal lines of mackerel clouds drifting across the sky.
Absorbing Western linear perspective and then boldly distorting and rebuilding it into his own graphic aesthetic was truly the work of a genius.
Japonisme That Shook the World: Echoes in Debussy, Monet and Van Gogh
After Japan opened to the world at the end of the Edo period, Hokusai's prints traveled to Europe through world's fairs and trade, causing a seismic shift in the Western art world: the explosion known as Japonisme.
For Western painters who had felt confined since the Renaissance by strict rules of light and shadow and exact perspective, Hokusai's bold cropping, flat planes of color and dynamic drawing that seized the essence of a subject in an instant were a revelation, a completely new way of seeing.
Claude Monet covered the walls of his home with ukiyo-e prints including works by Hokusai. Edgar Degas eagerly studied figure poses from the Hokusai Manga sketchbooks. Vincent van Gogh wrote enthusiastic praise of Hokusai in letters to his brother Theo. In music, the French composer Claude Debussy drew deep inspiration from the dynamism of the Great Wave when composing La Mer, and famously used Hokusai's wave on the cover of the first edition of the score.
A single ukiyo-e artist, working in a corner of faraway Edo and simply pursuing lively lines and colors, created print after print. The visual revolution Hokusai began has leaped easily across time and borders, and it continues to send great ripples through art, design, photography and animation around the world today.
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References
- Asano Shugo, Katsushika Hokusai: Fuji o Oikaketa Gakyo Rojin, Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2014
- Nagata Seiji, Hokusai no Sekai, Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2017
- Tsuji Nobuo, Nihon Bijutsu no Rekishi, University of Tokyo Press, 2005
- Uchida Chizuko, Bero-ai no Nazo: Ukiyo-e no Aoi Kakumei, Yuzankaku, 2008
- Mabuchi Akiko, Japonisme: Genso no Nihon, Brucke, 2015
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