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Download a PDF of the Hokusai's Summit: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji exhibition educational guide.
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WHAT YOU'LL SEE
The exhibition is made up of six sections, putting Hokusai and Mount Fuji into cultural context. And for the first time, there will be an educational element within the gallery, with interactive activities for visitors.
Section 1: Visitors start with an introduction to Mount Fuji, and its almost cultlike place in Japanese culture. The section includes painting from the Richard Lane Collection, conserved by the Academy’s Asian Painting Conservation Studio, which closed in July, and an extremely rare woodblock-printed map of Mount Fuji that was meant to be cut out and assembled as a three-dimensional model.
Section 2: An overview of Hokusai, which will reveal the development of his style, starting with rare early student works. Hokusai works placed next to a copperplate engraving by 18th-century English artist William Hogarth and a Rembrandt etching will illustrate how Hokusai adapted Western art elements such as perspective.
Section 3: “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” will be spread throughout half the gallery, with a special place for the three most famous prints—The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Mount Fuji in Clear Weather (commonly known as Red Fuji), and Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit. In the gallery will be a desk where viewers can sit and write haiku while contemplating the works. Also in this section will be selections from the Taisho-era “Stations of the Tökaidö” series, the most ambitious woodblock print project of the 20th century, to demonstrate the enduring influence of Mount Fuji.
Education corner: Visitors can watch a video on woodblock printing and view a folding book showing the color-by-color steps of printmaking, along with actual tools and examples of paper. Visitors can also create their own three-color print—a free 12-page guide will include a blank page on which visitors can stamp an image at stations located throughout the exhibition.
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Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”
Japan, Edo period, c. 1830 – 1834
Color woodblock print
25.9 x 38.5 cm
Honolulu Academy of Arts: Gift of James A. Michener, 1955
(13695)
Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849)
Mount Fuji in Clear Weather, or Red Fuji, from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”
Japan, Edo period, c. 1830 – 1834
Color woodblock print
25.5 x 36.8 cm
Honolulu Academy of Arts: Gift of James A. Michener, 1970
(15583)
Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849)
Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”
Japan, Edo period, c. 1830 – 1834
Color woodblock print
25.5 x 38.2 cm
Honolulu Academy of Arts: Gift of James A. Michener, 1970
(15928)
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For the first time in a decade, the Honolulu Academy of Arts presents Katsushika Hokusai’s entire “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” series, one of the museum’s masterpieces. Augmenting the exhibition will be works depicting Mount Fuji by other artists.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was one of the most prolific Japanese artists of the late Edo period (1615-1868). During a career spanning more than seven decades, he is estimated to have produced as many as 30,000 works, ranging from paintings and drawings to book illustrations.
He is best known today as a designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and in particular was one of the early innovators in the development of landscape prints that characterized the last great development of the ukiyo-e tradition in the 19th century. His print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is one of the most influential and recognizable designs ever made.
The Honolulu Academy of Arts’ more than 500 prints by Hokusai, one of the finest collections of its type in the world—and a gift from the late novelist James Michener, includes a complete set of the renowned "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series. Few institutions own the whole set. A monumental accomplishment, this series comprises many of Hokusai’s most famous prints, including The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Mount Fuji in Clear Weather (commonly known as Red Fuji), and Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit.
This special exhibition will present the entire series. Fragile and sensitive to fading, many of the prints in this series are among the Academy's rarest and most precious works, and they are placed on public display only infrequently. This will be an exceptional opportunity to see some of the museum's signature works of art, and the first time in a decade that the complete series has been displayed.
The series will be accompanied by other prints from Hokusai revealing his remarkable output, and later works inspired by the series that show the central place of Mount Fuji as a symbol of Japan.
Hokusai and the West
In the late 19th century, the Western world developed a fascination for Japanese art that resulted in the European-American art phenomenon known as Japonisme. In the West, Hokusai’s works were highly prized by impressionist and postimpressionist artists such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was so inspired by The Great Wave Off Kanagawa that in 1905 he composed the groundbreaking La Mer (The Sea) in 1905 to honor it. The first edition of the cover of the score of La Mer was a stylized detail of Hokusai's print at the composer's request, and a copy of the print hung in Debussy’s study.
Although Hokusai’s work was commercially successful in Japan, the international significance of his designs was first recognized in Europe and the United States. The first exhibition devoted to Hokusai was held in 1890 by the Fine Arts Society of London. It was followed by an exhibition, Hokusai and His School, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1893. In contrast, Japan didn’t have a Hokusai exhibition until 1900, in Tokyo.
Hokusai’s superb draftsmanship and harmonious use of colors, as well as his individuality and originality, attracted Westerners on an intuitive level, suggesting a quality that people felt Western society had lost during the course of modern industrialization. The Japanese genre of ukiyo-e (literally “pictures of the floating world”) from which Hokusai’s prints were born, incited a visual revolution among European and American artists, providing a new artistic vocabulary of subjects drawn from nature, expressive lines, abstract graphic style, decorative colors, bold flat patterns, and dramatic asymmetrical compositions. In the West, Hokusai’s work opened the door to rethinking what defined art and how it could evolve in the modern age.
Hokusai and Mt. Fuji
Mount Fuji is Japan’s highest, most sacred mountain. The snow-capped conical form has become famous worldwide as a symbol of Japan, most significantly through Hokusai’s
images of the mountain. However, Mount Fuji’s importance in Japan dates to well before Hokusai, inspiring generations of artists and poets since Japan’s earliest recorded history. At the same time, Mount Fuji’s popularity increased dramatically during the Edo period (1615-1868), which witnessed a sudden jump in literary and artistic representations of the mountain. During the 19th century, Mt. Fuji gradually became a national symbol, taking on a special significance as a symbol of national strength as Japan became exposed to other international powers. Hokusai’s Fuji came to symbolize the identity of Edo and its people and eventually the entire nation of Japan during this period of domestic and international turmoil. At the same time, its sacred character was preserved as the foundation for its role as modern Japan’s most important symbol.
The exhibition is curated by Sawako Chang, Project Manager and Japanese Art Research Assistant for the Academy’s Asian Art Department.
This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Hawai'i Council for the Humanities and is officially endorsed by the Consulate General of Japan in Honolulu.
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