Hokusai / Russell Delphi Collected Works of Katsushika Hokusai (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78877-987-6
Verlag: Delphi Classics Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 50, 1415 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Masters of Art

Hokusai, the Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e school, produced a vast array of artworks, including single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors, hand paintings, individual surimonos, erotic books and many more. His famous print series 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji' marks the summit in the history of the Japanese landscape print, as epitomised by his world famous design 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'. Hokusai's determined industry, spanning over seventy years of continuous creation, serves as the prototype of the single-minded artist, striving to complete his given task in the endless pursuit of perfection. Delphi's Masters of Art Series presents the world's first digital e-Art books, allowing readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Hokusai's collected works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)
* The collected works of Katsushika Hokusai - over 800 prints, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order
* Includes reproductions of rare works
* Features a special 'Highlights' section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information
* Enlarged 'Detail' images, allowing you to explore Hokusai's celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books
* Hundreds of images in colour - highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smart phones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders
* Special alphabetical contents table for the prints
* Easily locate the prints you wish to view
* Features a bonus biography by C. J. Holmes - discover Hokusai's artistic and personal life
Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art books
CONTENTS:
The Highlights
Segawa Kikunojo III as Oren
Ichikawa Ebizo as Sanzoku
Descending Geese for Bunshichi
One Hundred Ghost Stories in a Haunted House
The Toilet
Sudden Rain at the New Yanagi Bridge, the Rainbow at Otakegura
Sonobe Saemon Yoritane
Hokusai Manga
Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
A Fisherman's Family
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Fine Wind, Clear Morning
Clear Autumn Weather at Choko
The Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido
Whaling off the Goto Islands
The Suspension Bridge on the Border of Hida and Etchu Provinces
The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji
Fuji over the Sea
Li Bai Admiring a Waterfall
The Prints
Hokusai's Prints
Alphabetical List of Prints
The Biography
Hokusai by C. J. Holmes
Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to buy the whole Art series as a Super Set

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hokusai, Katsushika

Russell, Peter

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
THOSE who have studied the evolution of European painting must have been struck, and perhaps saddened, by the exceeding rarity of supreme pictorial success on a continent which, for the last thousand years, might be thought to have had a monopoly of the world’s culture. The intellectual activity of Asia during the same period has seemed little more than a vague rumour, which the political impotence of India and China appears to dissipate finally. To claim a place among the great masters for an Oriental artisan, unrecognised even by the connoisseurs of his own country, may therefore seem to convict the claimant of caprice, if not of wilful ignorance. Those unused to Japanese paintings and colour-prints are apt to pass them by as mere curiosities, interesting perhaps, but only one degree less remote and barbaric than the carved monsters on a Polynesian war-club. The mistake is not unnatural. Our own pictorial formulae and vehicles have so long been stereotyped by custom that we regard them as absolute laws, from which no deviation is possible. We forget that, in their outward decorative aspect, pictures are strictly limited by ever-changing material conditions, by the surroundings in which they are placed. Architecture being the true base of painting in common with the other arts of design, it follows that the scheme of tone and colour in a good picture is always adapted to a place in some building which the artist has, more or less definitely, in his mind’s eye. That for modern painters this building should generally be a large exhibition gallery is not the least of their misfortunes. Now the architecture of Japan is peculiar, a fact which has to be borne in mind when we criticise the national style of painting. The whole Archipelago is volcanic, and more or less violent earthquakes are exceedingly common. On more stable soils the energy of other artistic peoples has found effective vent in tall and solid edifices of brick or stone. In such a country these are an absurdity. The inhabitants have solved the difficulty by building light and elastic structures of timber, many of which have proved a match for the shocks of eight or more centuries. Though generally erected with an eye to their part in a scheme of landscape gardening, the temples and important buildings often display great beauty of design and detail. Dwelling-houses, on the other hand, are simple in the extreme — mere frames of wood, walled and divided into rooms by sliding lattices, panels, and screens. Furniture is reduced to a minimum. One or two kakemono (the tall “hanging-picture” familiar to collectors), with, perhaps, a single piece of choice porcelain, or lacquer signed by a great craftsman, supply all that is thought necessary in the way of decoration. Where all is so empty and spacious, paintings, being things of comparatively small size, must be striking and lively if the effect of the room is to escape the reproach of tameness. Thus arose the conventions that gave Japanese painting, and through it Japanese colourprinting, the peculiar qualities that make them so distinct from Western design. Hokusai, in his Treatise on Colouring (1848), mentions Dutch oil-painting and Dutch etching, with the criticism—” In Japanese art they render form and colour without aiming at relief; in the European process they seek relief and ocular illusion.” He concludes impartially by admitting both points of view. Indeed the Oriental position is not wholly indefensible. The omission of shadow, while it hinders the pictorial treatment of much that is attractive to European eyes, and limits the artist to beautiful form and beautiful colour, has at least one advantage. It absolutely precludes the pretentious realism that would make a picture a kind of sham nature, a deceptive imitation of natural objects that is far commoner among us than we are apt to imagine. In the absence of shadow, a picture can never seem to be anything but the flat expanse of pigment that it actually is, and so keeps its place as a part of the wall surface. It would be a mistake to suppose that Japanese art attained this harmony with its surroundings all at once. In its origin it is wholly derivative, since, for centuries, the island painters did nothing that was not an imitation of the much earlier work of the Chinese and Coreans. Thus to view their achievement in true perspective, we must first examine that of the mainland. Were we to trust tradition, we should have to believe that art was flourishing in China and Corea long before the Christian era. No paintings, however, are said to survive that are older than the eighth century A.D., the period of the great Wu Taotsz, whose fame is perpetuated by a few works of doubtful authenticity and many fantastic legends. That relating to his end is a fair specimen of them. It is said that he was commissioned ‘by the Emperor to decorate a room in the palace at Pekin. Concealing himself and his work by curtains, Wu Taotsz laboured in solitude for many months. At last the Emperor was summoned to view the completed painting: the curtains were drawn aside, and he was shown a picture of a palace, with splendid gardens behind it. Filled with admiration, he expressed his regret that he could never possess the reality. Wu Taotsz answered by walking up to a door in the foreground of the picture, which he opened, and, turning, invited the Emperor to follow him. As the artist spoke from within the doorway the door suddenly closed upon him, and immediately the whole painting vanished, leaving the Emperor face to face with a blank wall. Wu Taotsz was followed by generation after generation of excellent painters, and it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that the artistic genius of the Chinese began to show signs of exhaustion, while a hundred years later vigour and originality survived only in the porcelain factories. The art of the Corean peninsula either started earlier than that of the mainland, or developed more rapidly. Whatever the period of its growth its excellence was short-lived, for by the time that Japan was turning its attention to pictures, Corea had ceased to possess a living art, and was content to export the productions of China. To those unacquainted with the history of Mongol civilisation the sight of even the few specimens of Chinese and Corean painting in the British Museum will come as a revelation, combining as they do an extraordinary vigour and naturalness, with a breadth of mass, a delicacy of handling, and a mastery of cool colour, that remind one of Andrea del Castagno or Paolo Uccello. Only in the period of decline do we come across jagged outlines and crowded contortion; the early work is as severe and simple as was the Memphite art of Egypt. When China was prosperous and civilised, and while Corean art was reaching its climax, the Japanese were still barbarians. This composite race — a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Corean elements — displaced the previous settlers, the hairy Ainu, some time before the Christian era. Under the influence of the arts and sciences that reached them from the mainland by-way of Corea, they emerged slowly from a savage condition and began to develop a marked taste for industrial and pictorial design. Not to go into historical detail, it will be sufficient to say that as far as painting is concerned, three separate traditions may be traced in Japanese work. Two of these are of considerable antiquity, but are almost entirely borrowed from the art of the continent; while the third is perhaps more nearly a national product, and, with ail its failings, had at least the merit of tolerance, a merit which enabled it to father the great art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first painting that came to Japan seems to have been the hieratic art of the Buddhist priests, splendid in colour and majestic in sentiment, but so conservative that it has lasted to our own time with comparatively little change. Its practitioners were chiefly skilful copyists who had only a moderate influence on the work of their contemporaries in the other fields of practical art. Chinese secular art did not become fashionable till a much later period, though the paintings of the mainland must have been imported from the earliest times. The tradition produced no really individual masters before the fifteenth century, when the germ of the school afterwards known as Kano took root. The painters of the Kano school, like their Chinese predecessors, worked most frequently in black and white, aiming at a semi-naturalistic treatment of landscapes, animals, and figures modified by the capabilities of the decisive brush stroke used for writing Chinese characters. Though the progress of the school was hindered by too strict adherence to traditional methods and subjects, the freshness and vigour of its great masters are the real backbone of the finest period of Japanese art. No influence is more prominent in the work of Hokusai’s maturity than that of the square forcible handling of the Kano painters, indeed their great humorist Itcho seems actually to anticipate the modern master in his lighter vein. The third school, known first as Yamato and later as Tosa, did not come into prominence till after the great civil wars which devastated Japan in the twelfth century. The Japanese themselves regard it as a national product, and to a certain degree they are right. Tosa painting, however, is not an original discovery so much as a combination of several quite distinct elements; and, as the school laid the foundations of the section of Japanese art with which we are at present concerned, it deserves more than a passing notice. Though its origin is still uncertain, it would appear from similarities of method and composition that...