The picture shows "Kanagawa Surfing"
A ukiyo-e painter who is "obsessed with painting"
What work in the world is so impressive that it can be recognized at a glance compared to the visual image of Katsushika Hokusai's colorful woodblock print "The Great Wave" (aka "Kanagawa Surfing", "One of the Thirty-Six Views of Fugaku") by Katsushika Hokusai? [Roger Keyes] Indeed, this work has made creator Katsushika Hokusai one of the most popular artists in the world. His painting style had a great influence on the later European painting world, and many impressionist painting masters such as Degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and so on copied his works. Mr. Lu Xun also commented: "However, in my opinion, Hokusai is still suitable for the eyes of ordinary Chinese people. ”
So, who is Katsushika Hokusai? What kind of fate does the painter have with China?
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), real name Nakajima Kitaro, was a Japanese ukiyo-e painter of the late Edo period. As a child, he was adopted by a royal bronze mirror miller who was related to the Tokugawa Ieji shogunate, and at the age of 14 he learned engraving and printing, and at the age of 18 he began his long and prolific artistic career by learning painting with Theo-e painter Haruaki Morikawa, who was known for drawing Kabuki prints. But Katsushika Hokusai didn't become famous until he was 60 years old, when he changed his name to "for one" (meaning "to be one person", "one person again"), intending to enter the new beginning of the next sixtieth anniversary. For the artist, each change of name means entering a new stage of life, such as the first use of the name "Painting Madman" in 1801 (the name Hokusai chose when reading the Analects between 1801 and 1802); the name "Painting Maniac" in 1805; the name changed to "Dai Dou" in 1813; and the initial name "swastika" (meaning "everything") in 1834, which was still used until the last moments of his life.
In 1834, Hokusai, who had entered the rare age of antiquity, looked back on the past and told several key things about his long artistic career on the copyright page of the book "Hundred Views of Fugaku":
Yu was fond of copywriting since he was six years old, and many paintings had been published in his fifties (illustrating Quting Maqin's adventure novels). The painting made before the age of seventy (as "Thirty-six Views of Fugaku") is not enough to take it. and seventy-three, fang wutong birds, beasts, fish and insect bones ("The Great Judgment of Flowers and Birds"), the state of growth of grass and trees ("Fuyue Hundred Views"). Eighty years of progress. Ninety must be exhausted. A hundred years old can be handy. At the age of one hundred and eleven, the paintings are all vivid. I hope that Yu can live a long life to prove that my words are not false. [Henry D. SmithII, Hokusai: OnehundredViewsofMountFuji (Hokusai: A Hundred Views of Fugaku), London, Thames & NewYork, George Braziller, 1988]
The picture shows "Thirty-six Views of Fugaku" (partial)
Hokusai talks most about the theme of Mt. Fuji throughout his artistic career. Before the age of 50, he painted countless Pictures of Mt. Fuji, after the age of 60 he integrated European painting techniques into his creations to present the "Thirty-Six Views of Fugaku", and after the age of 70 (about 1834), he created the "Hundred Views of Mt. Fugaku" with a personal imprint. The author found that in "Thirty-Six Views of Fugaku", Mt. Fuji is a static center in the scene of human activities, and is skillfully combined with the labor and life scenes of the people, while in "The Hundred Views of Fugaku", Mt. Fuji constitutes the entire world. In the last few years of his life, Hokusai returned to Mt. Fuji because he was convinced that he could derive the power to prolong his life.
In the half century after Hokusai's death, in 1843, hokusai manga was collected by the printing house of the National Library in Paris; in 1860, the British Museum purchased the first Hokusai print; around 1866, the French artist Felix Brachmund imitated the hokusai manga pattern and designed decorative patterns for the tableware of the "Rousseau" dinner party; in 1867, at the World Industrial Art Exposition in Paris, the shogunate sent to exhibit 60 exhibits, Hokusai's Hokusai manga and picture book Musashi stirrups. It was extremely well received; in 1900, a large-scale exhibition on the theme of Hokusai was held for the first time in Tokyo, and by this time he had established a reputation on an international scale.
Hokusai's Chinese imagination
Chinese elements were ubiquitous in Japan during the Edo period (1614-1868). They provide Katsushika Hokusai with a medium of painting, a stylistic tone, and themes and content to engage the viewer. But for most Japanese people of this period, China was still the imaginary world, a source of distant ancient culture and wisdom.
The picture shows "Scenic Map of China" (partial)
However, with the publication of practical multi-volume guides in Japan, such as Illustrations of Chinese Places (circa 1806), the image of China was more tangible. Katsushika Hokusai may have consulted some of the earlier publications when he created the Scenic Map of China (1840, in the collection of the British Library, London), but in this map he brings the viewer an impression of the rich landscape of the area by drawing the mountains and coastline in proportion. The map identifies China's territory and smaller cities (shown in an elliptical box), geographical features (shown in a one-sided rectangular box), and major cities and provinces (shown in bilateral rectangular boxes). The brown curve represents the Great Wall, while the small triangle represents the roof of the house, indicating the distribution of the Chinese by the density of the triangle. This imaginary bird's-eye view of China, along with four other aerial views of Japan's famous places, is actually a group of paintings, and is the last of the group paintings, completed between 1818 and 1848.
The picture shows "Dragon in the Clouds"
In addition, some spiritual magic weapons that can express unique personal beliefs have become amulets in Hokusai's creation, including not only mythical figures with boundless mana such as the ghost king Tianshi Zhong Kui, but also walking beasts and legendary beasts such as tigers, dragons, and Chinese lions.
The image of the dragon has been expressed in Chinese material relics such as jade, bronze, bronze, and stone carving since primitive society. Before the Han Dynasty, the image of the dragon was too decorative and abstract, so that "although the dragon is not described, but the leaf is good and the real dragon is even, then the dragon is a painting, and its inheritance has been passed down for a long time." Wu Cao Fuxing tasted the red dragon in the stream and saw the red dragon out of the water, wrote to dedicate Sun Hao, the world thought it was a god, and then lost his legend" (Xuanhe Pictorial Notation, vol. 9). By the beginning of the Song Dynasty, the image of the dragon "had three stops and nine resemblings, meandering, and lifting and descending" (three stops: from the head to the arm, from the arm to the waist, and from the waist to the tail. Nine likes: horns like deer, head like chi, eyes like ghosts, neck like snakes, belly like mirages, scales like fish, claws like eagles, palms like tigers, ears like cattle. "Pictorial Chronicles", Vol. 1). For example, the monks of the Northern Song Dynasty, Dong Yu, and Chen Rong of the Southern Song Dynasty all wrote about dragons. It is no wonder that Dong Yu "got his name from the dragon water in the time, and the best brush in modern times" (Xuanhe Pictorial Notation, vol. 9).
The picture shows Chen Rong's "Kowloon Map" (partial)
It can be found that the dragon in Hokusai's pen, ink, image and composition, is in the same vein as the works of the famous dragon painters of the Song Dynasty, especially similar to the Southern Song Dynasty Chen Rong (trumpet so-wong), all of which have the same characteristics of "three stops and nine resemblances", and the dragon head looks down, his eyes stare at the sky, his whiskers erupt, the eagle's claws and tiger paws, the dragon's body swirls, and soars into the sky, which is almost the same as the dragon in Chen Rong's "Nine Dragon Scrolls" (1244, the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA) by a rushing current of water to push into a huge whirlpool. In Hokusai's Dragon in the Clouds (1849, collection of the Museum of Asian Art, Guimet, Paris), the highlights of the dragon's head, claws, scales, and spines are left blank, and the ink color is blended from light to deep, and finally ends with sprinkled ink spots. This is also the same as Chen Rong's method of painting dragons by mixing ink splash dyeing, dry pen sketching and blank space.
Zhong Kui was a good god of fighting ghosts and exorcising evil spirits in ancient China, and his image was formed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and was transmitted to Japan with the Envoys of the Tang Dynasty during the Sui and Tang Dynasties. In Japan, the red bell is believed to be a god that can be used to ward off evil spirits and remove smallpox diseases. From the winter of 1846 to the New Year of 1847, a large-scale outbreak of smallpox blight [Nishiyama Matsunosukeetal. eds), Edogakujiten (Edo Gakujiten), Tokyo, Kōbundō, 1984]. Hokusai's "Red Bell Map" (metropolitan museum of art collection) was created at this time, meaning to protect the owner from smallpox infection, and is the most outstanding of the painter's portraits of the bells. In the picture, Zhong Kui stepped on the official boots, his arms were folded in front of him like a bow, he was dressed in a robe with a long sword, the bright lines outlined the strength and calmness of the Celestial Master, and the complex red smudge of the layers made the characters full of strong visual impact and tension on the picture. It is very similar to the image of Zhong Kui described in the Northern Song Dynasty Shen Kuo's "Mengxi Pen Talk and Supplementary Pen Talk", "the big one wears a hat, wears a blue dress, has one arm, and has two feet, but catches his small one, cuts his eyes, and then grabs him".
Hokusai's dragon's strong expression and gaze exude vitality, making it almost possess the conscious emotions that belong to humans. And his Zhong Kui has become a widely loved god of exorcism. In a sense, "these figures are Hokusai's self-portraits." Through them, the artist maintains a proud and powerful communication with us" [Timothy Clark].
For Japanese artists with cultural identity, including Hokusai, classical Chinese culture is an inexhaustible treasure trove. It is not difficult to imagine why Hokusai is fond of the Chinese novels "Journey to the West" and "Water Margin". "The Water Margin novel was introduced to Japan in the early 17th century and soon became popular among the intellectual class. An annotated Japanese edition and a simplified translation were published in the 18th century" [Alfred Haft, Curator of Japanese Art in the Asian Section of the British Museum], which also aroused great interest from Katsushika Hokusai. While creating ukiyo-e, he also personally drew a large number of illustrations for Chinese novels, which were printed as "Journey to the West" and "New Compilation of Water Margin Paintings". The new Series of Novels of the Water Margin has been published in 91 volumes over the past three decades.
The Zhou brothers' love and promotion of Hokusai prints
Both lu xun and Zhou Zuoren were fond of printmaking, but the difference was that Lu Xun's love for woodcuts was mixed with a clear sense of utilitarianism, as he said in the Small Introduction to the Selected Works of New Russian Paintings (The Complete Works of Lu Xun, vol. 7, Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 1973, p. 768): "And because of the needs of the revolution, there was propaganda, indoctrination, decoration and popularization, so in this era, printmaking - woodcuts, lithographs, illustrations, paintings, etching plates - were very developed. "When there was a revolution, printmaking was the most widely used, and although it was extremely hurried, it could be done in an instant." Zhou Zuoren, on the other hand, is particularly fond of Japanese printmaking ukiyo-e. However, they have spared no effort in promoting Katsushika Hokusai in China.
During his study in Japan, Lu Xun was already exposed to Katsushika Hokusai's works. However, due to limited financial resources at that time, it was difficult to collect expensive ukiyo-e works. It was not until the early 1930s, after Lu Xun advocated the emerging Chinese woodcut movement, that he began collecting ukiyo-e prints. There are more than 60 ukiyo-e prints in Lu Xun's collection, many of which are gifts from Japanese friends.
The bibliography of GeShige Hokusai in the Beijing Lu Xun Museum is listed in the order of Lu Xun's purchase time as follows:
Hokusai Oda Kazukazu was published in 1926 by the Ars Society in Tokyo as the fifteenth volume of the Ars Art Series (purchased in 1926)
Katsushika Hokusai by Mijiro Noguchi published in 1930 in The hardcover edition of 1,000 copies of the Limited Private Edition No. 773 (purchased in January 1931)
Katsushika Hokusai by Mijiro Noguchi published in 1932 in Makoto, Tokyo, in a hardcover edition of the "Six Ukiyo-e Artists" (purchased in October 1932)
There is also one of seven ukiyo-e paintings donated by a Japanese friend Nagao Keikazu in 1931.
Among them, Lu Xun attached great importance to the "Six Great Ukiyo-e Masters" decision edition (sixteen open hardcover editions) compiled by Noguchi Yonejiro. When he purchased the series of books, he even recorded the wooden box of books provided by the publishing bookstore in his diary: "In the afternoon, I went to the Uchiyama Bookstore and got... the book "Katsushika Hokusai"... He also had to publish a book box for the deciding edition of "Ukiyo Painting [Painting] Six Masters" donated by the publishing house, and Yoshijiro Noguchi signed it himself. (The Complete Works of Lu Xun, vol. 15, Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 1981, p. 36) In the series of books, Noguchi Yonejiro also gave a detailed introduction to Hokusai and selected nearly 100 works.
The picture shows Katsushika Hokusai dressed as an angler's self-portrait
In the spring of 1934, Lu Xun said in a letter to his Japanese friend Hatsue Yamamoto: "Regarding japanese ukiyo-e painters, I liked Hokusai when I was young, and now I am Hiroshige, followed by the characters of Kakuto", "However, in my opinion, Hokusai is still suitable for the eyes of ordinary Chinese people." (The Complete Works of Lu Xun, vol. 13, Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 1981, p. 558) Perhaps Lu Xun believed that not many people in China at that time could appreciate ukiyo-e, and Hokusai's paintings fundamentally reflected the spiritual outlook of the working people of Japan and were more suitable for the eyes of ordinary Chinese people, so he planned to give priority to introduction. This is in line with his early advocacy of "carrying forward the true beauty to entertain people's feelings". However, at that time, social turmoil was unstable, the people did not even guarantee the basic food and clothing and life safety, young art lovers were powerless to buy, and the literary and art circles also lacked the atmosphere of caring about the purchase of books, as Lu Xun said: "The current China is really thorny, all you see is the breath of the fox and the tiger and the greed of the rabbit, in literature and art, the only thing left is coldness and destruction." (The Complete Works of Lu Xun, vol. 7, pp. 847-848) Therefore, in this situation, it was difficult to publish a book, and even the dozens of prints that Lu Xun himself had hidden could not be taken out to appreciate.
Katsushika Hokusai's flowers, birds and animals
In addition to Lu Xun, among the Chinese literati who introduced Katsushika Hokusai to China, his brother Zhou Zuoren should have started earlier and focused the most. His love of Hokusai and ukiyo-e can almost be described as "highly respected." He once lamented: "Why don't there be such paintings in China?" (Zhou Zuoren: "A Glance at the Two Sides of the Sumida River", quoted from "Miscellaneous Notes of Bitter Bamboo", Shanghai Liangyou Book Company, 1936, pp. 160-167)
According to Zhou Zuoren's self-description in his essay "About Japanese Painters" (Art Magazine, August 1, 1943, Vol. 1, No. 2), he was widely exposed to ukiyo-e at the turn of meiji and Taisho (before and after the Xinhai Revolution in China) before and after the end of his study abroad life. This flower magazine, which was founded in Meiji 43 (1910) dedicated to ukiyo-e, and Nagai's Appreciation of Uki-e (later included in Edo Art). He also said: "In the "Ancient and Modern Celebrity Paintings" of Shanghai Stone Seal at the end of the Qing Dynasty, there are several strange character paintings, and later when I saw Hokusai's painting score, I learned that it was his handwriting. In his opinion, the ukiyo-e of the late Qing Dynasty had been introduced to China, and the most accomplished Hokusai works were imported, but they were not indicated.
Shusaku's admiration for Hokusai is particularly evident, and this is also reflected in the article "List of the Two Sides of the Sumida River". He quotes Katsushika Hokusai's "List of the Two Sides of the Sumida River" (Customs Scroll Picture Publications Guild, 1917) appended to Kubota Yonezai' quotation:
This book not only depicts objects such as the bridge forest hall tower dipped in the Sumida River, but also carefully describes the four hours of the world, so it can also be seen as a kind of Edo Mid-Year painting scroll, when the customs of the time appeared on the paper. Moreover, his drawings are not as exaggerated and strange as those scattered in Hokusai's later works, so even among the many picture books that Hokusai has published, it can be regarded as one of the excellent masterpieces.
The contents of the book are introduced as follows through the comments in Nagai Hefeng's "Ukiyo-e Landscape Paintings and the Edo Nomensu" (Part III of the Treatise on Edo Art):
The book consists of three volumes, and its picture is like an unfolding scroll, which continuously includes the scenery on both sides of the Sumida River at four o'clock from the first volume to the next volume. The first appearance of the opening volume is the dawn of the high wheel. Behind the lonely horse traveler wrapped in a cloak, followed by several pedestrians wearing the same hat, walking back and forth to each other through the door of the tea shop where the tea girl stood. The reed curtain of the tea shop does not know how many fields are connected along the coast, becoming a semicircle, looking continuously, and in the distance on the waves of the harbor there is a large fishing boat decorated with pine branches of the first moon, majestically erecting his sails with Fuji in the clear sky. In the second picture, there are samurai wearing turbans and dresses, citizens, foremen, women with children, girls in flower shirts, and servants who carry burdens, all taking advantage of a ferry, two boats with large pipe bags hanging from their waists, standing at the head and tail of the boat with bamboo pens to stab the boat, this is the ferry of tenants.
Between the lines, you can feel a picture of folk life full of life atmosphere and mood.
As for the content of Katsushika Hokusai and ukiyo-e, we can also get an insight from Zhou Zuoren's articles such as "Ukiyo-e of Japan" (1917), "On Japanese Culture Book" (1936), "On Japanese Culture Book II" (1936), "Re-understanding Japan" (1942), "Edo Wind Objects and Ukiyo-e" (1944) and other articles.
If it is said that Lu Xun collects, appreciates, and studies Hokusai, in addition to his hobbies, but also to broaden his horizons, to "use it for my own use", and to serve the development of Chinese art, then, in Zhou Zuoren, Hokusai and other ukiyo-e art are mainly not appreciated as fine art. ("About the Japanese Painter") Although there is an element of self-effacing, it can be seen that the Zhou brothers' prints of Hokusai originated from their initial liking.
Undoubtedly, this extraordinary painter who has spanned the century and influenced global art, this friend who has framed the cultural interconnection between China and Japan with the imagination of art, and the ukiyo-e master who is highly respected by Zhou Kunzhong, the fate with China has long been predestined in the dark. This year marks the 170th anniversary of Katsushika Hokusai's death, and it is commemorated with this article alone.
P.S. I would like to express my gratitude for the help of Ms. Li Ning, curator of the China Museum of Art.
Author: Wang Ren (The author is an assistant researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, this article is the phased result of the 2017 National Social Science Foundation project "Research on the Western Painting Movement of the Republic of China and cultural exchanges between China and the West") Editor: Zhu Sijun Responsible Editor: Liu Di