Hokusai: The End of an Era

please join me in welcoming Sarah Thompson all right Thank You Jasmine for the introduction and thank all of you for coming today my title is hooks I the end of an era but of course the end of one ERA is the beginning of another so what I really will look at today is aspects of the work of Hokusai that hint at what is going to come later on after his death so he lived from 1760 to 1849 a period when all kinds of things were happening in the world and there are many interesting aspects of historical developments that we can find in Hokusai's work especially as woodblock prints so I'm going to be looking at technology including both Hokusai's use of technology and also aspects of technology that we can see in his work and then one special component within that is his use of Western perspective and how that came about I'll also talk a bit about travel as we see it in the works of Hulka sigh there's a little a little hint down here at the bottom and I'll talk just at the end about storytelling and these are all things that are aspects of his work that reflect what was going on at the time but also when you know what is going to happen next at the end of the 19th century you can see some hints of what is to come now we had an excellent introduction last week I came to Professor Maxie's lecture last week and I was very impressed with the way he set the stage and explained very clearly what was going on in Japan during hulk-sized lifetime so I'm going to just remind you of some of the things that he talked about and that I will be referring to also and you may want to have a look at the of handouts again most of this vocabulary is not new at all but you had it already last week and I'll just repeat it in a slightly different context so here's the map of Japan there are four big islands these are modern maps of course so it's got modern place names but for big islands and a number of small ones Hocus I mostly worked on the island of Honshu the big main island in terms of size Japan is roughly about the size of California so that gives you the approximate idea of the geographical area that we're dealing with and in Hokusai's time there were three big cities that were very very important one of the characteristics of this period known as the Edo period because Japan was governed from the city of Edo which we know today as Tokyo there we go think of it as Edo for a hokusai purposes so the three big cities were Edo which was where the Shogun had his headquarters the Shogun was the military dictator who ruled Japan in the name of the Emperor the Emperor already was a figurehead so it wasn't that different in the late 19th century when they switched over to a British style constitutional monarchy and had a prime minister instead who was ruling in the name of a figurehead Emperor excuse me the Emperor was located in the city of Kyoto let's see here we can look at this a closer up map so there's Edo there is kyoto that had been the capital of Japan ever since 794 and it actually technically was still the capital all the way up until 1868 because the capital in Japan is defined as where the Emperor is in 1868 the Emperor moved to Tokyo and that was when they changed the name of the city but already it was the the real administrative center throughout a hulk-sized lifetime and then the third of the three big cities was the city of all Saka still a very important large city today and especially known as the city of the merchants in those days two other cities that were important for Hulk side that we'll mention from time to time the city of Nagoya it's between Edo and Kyoto though a little bit closer to Kyoto there is Nagoya and of course it is special for us here at the MFA because we have a sister museum there today the Nagoya Boston MFA oh and another important city here on the southern island of Kyushu the city of Nagasaki so what is important about Nagasaki is that during the Edo period that was the port through which Japan had its very limited contact with the rest of the world now this is known as the period when Japan was largely cut off from the outside world the name of that policy was sakoku Sasa kuthi the seclusion policy the Tokugawa clan of Shogun's who ruled Japan absolutely banned any Japanese no matter how high ranking from going abroad if you were Japanese you could not leave Japan if you got shipwrecked or something and tried to come back you were likely to be executed so anybody that that left had to stay away and foreigners could only come to Japan under very tightly controlled circumstances there were four countries that Japan did have trade with Korea the closest country um and that was the only one that they actually had full diplomatic relations with um they did not they traded with China but not officially because Japan at that time did not recognize the government of China the dynasty had changed back in 1644 and the Japanese had supported the previous Ming Dynasty and did not recognize the Ching dynasty that took over so they let Chinese merchants come in but they did not have diplomatic relations China similarly they allowed merchants from the Netherlands to come but they did not have official diplomatic relations the UQ islands were a little more complicated that is the chain of islands down here which today is part of Japan it is Okinawa Prefecture in Japan but at that time it was an independent country and they did have a relationship not with the Shogun's government in Edo but with the a Satsuma domain here on Kyushu which in turn had a relationship with the Shogun's government so that was a little more complicated but that was the situation the reason why the Netherlands of all the European countries was the one that they allowed in was that in the previous century actually from about the 1540s to the 1630s japan had had very extensive contact with europe there had been people especially from Spain and Portugal which were the great world powers at that time also from other countries including England there had been visits to Japan there were two Japanese embassies that went to Rome to visit the Pope during that time but eventually after the Tokugawa's took power and put an end to the civil war that had been going on for over a century they decided that it was just too too dangerous too many problems they threw out all the Europeans except the Dutch they strictly banned Christianity the missionaries were a big part of the problem they strictly banned Christianity practicing Christianity could could get you executed also although there were people who did it secretly um but the Dutch had never sent missionaries they'd never tried to proselytize they just wanted to trade and make money and that was okay with the Japanese so they did maintain the relationship with them so that is what was going on however as Professor Maxie explained last week they were the Shogun's government was very well informed the Dutch were required who write reports every year and tell the Japanese in detail what had happened in Europe so they didn't know what was going on I am going to be showing a lot of pictures by Hokusai that come out of this very interesting a work that is in the exhibition you may not have noticed it because it's small and it's black and white rather than in color but we have a very interesting set of drawings for a picture book that was never published we don't have the exact date but probably about 1823 there was in 1823 an advertisement for a book that sounds like this one but that book never appeared so maybe that's what this is these that looks like something printed and in fact those those outlines are printed so Hokusai it's not signed but it looks exactly like his style it's got to be him a whole cuz I did the drawings within this framework then if the book had been published the drawings would have been destroyed they would have been glued face down to the wooden blocks and the block cutters would have cut through them to make the book but it didn't happen we don't know why for some reason the book was not published but the drawings survived the book the construction of a Japanese book actually these are different pages but no I take it back these are a different sides of the same that fold there is it's two photographs but that fold there is the same fold there you're looking at two different sides of a sheet of paper that's been folded in half and then the cut part is bound together with a string binding this is how Japanese books were typically made because the paper was thin and you couldn't really in practical terms a print on both sides so the reason I'm showing you these pages even though these are not among the pages that are on display in the exhibition is that it's Hoka size drawings of the four social classes that in theory and I emphasize in theory were the the hierarchy in Edo period Japan it's from a section dealing with different kinds of people so ignore ignored the picture at the far right that is a people of different ages old people and little children but then he starts here with the four social classes and remember in Japanese books and pictures you are expected to read the text or the image from right to left so we're looking from right to left so the four classes here are the samurai and he gives two examples here is an actual warrior in armor and then here is an older man in formal clothing who would be a lord of some kind he might be a daimyo one of the local rulers who governed the country directly under the Shogun so they are the rulers then the next most important of the peasant class who grow the food and then classes three and four are the artisans and here is a carpenter with his tools and the merchants and the merchants is is weighing something with a little a handheld scale so those are the two lower classes a merchants theoretically are parasites and are the lowest and so forth but in fact in this this society that developed in Japan beginning in the 17th century often they were richer than not than many of the poorer samurai now hokusai himself and most of his audience belonged to the group known as Chonan and japanese it translates as townspeople of those are the people in big cities who are a combination of the the artisan and merchants classes so that was a hulk-sized own personal origins and the first aspect of technology that i want to talk about in connection with hokusai is of course the technology of printing this became very important in Japan beginning in the 17th century first printed books and then from the 1680s on printed pictures which as we'll see developed out of the book publishing industry it's very interesting there's there's some comparative study that needs to be done people are aware of this but nobody has really looked carefully at the details the spread of printing and publishing in Europe versus the spread of printing and publishing in Japan the interesting thing is that in Europe this great sudden flourishing of printed books is traced to the development of movable type printing by Gutenberg beginning in 1455 then suddenly there began to be far more apprentice and there had ever been before now the interesting thing is that something similar happens in Japan in in the 17th century but it's not because of a technological development the Japanese knew about movable type but they rejected it as Professor Maxie told you last week they actually found out about it from two sources at about the same time by coincidence Gutenberg was not actually the first to print books using movable metal type it had already been done in a separate development by the koreans about a hundred years earlier the the chinese had had had sort of started trying to develop the technique but they never quite worked it out because they were using wood and ceramic for the type you really need metal type if you're going to be reusing it it has to be very sturdy the Koreans did it successfully and Japan had a war with Korea in the 1590s they found out about the Korean use of movable type and at the same time they found out about it from the Europeans the Jesuits were actually printing books in romanized Japanese in Japan however when the Japanese tried it for themselves they did it and they decided they didn't like it and we don't really know why not many suggestions have been made the Japanese writing system is complicated so it there are lots and lots and lots of symbols it's not an easy thing to reuse the type also the Japanese really liked pictures in their books so if you are having lots of pictures anyway you might as well carve out the text on a single block of wood the same way you do the pictures so again this hasn't really been studied don't exactly know but using this wood cut wood block technology the Japanese did have an enormous ly successful printing and publishing industry from the 17th century on as I said it started with printed books catering to this new population in the big cities urbanization is one of the big developments that happens in Japan in the 17th century and there is a great rise in the rate of literacy so suddenly there are lots more people who want books and have not a lot of money but a little bit so printing becomes a very profitable business the in the case of the printed pictures they developed out of of the printed books and it's important to remember that these are not art prints being created by the artist the artist is just one of many employees of the person who really controls the whole thing is the publisher the artist draws it the block cutter cuts the blocks the printer prints them and we have a demonstration of a modern reproductions being made by the old method at the end of the exhibition from about the 1680s on the publishers had the clever idea that if they could sell books full of pictures they could also sell pictures as a new product line in addition to the books so we begin to get single sheet woodblock prints it's the beginning of this a great art form of a Japanese printmaking the style of our is called kyo a literally pictures of the floating world and the floating world is that world of popular culture in the big cities now kyo a is not limited to prince it also includes the paintings that you can see in the show the book illustrations that the prints come out of but it is very strongly associated with prints so there is an early example a by mauro Nobu considered the first known kyo a artist it's important to remember these are a commercial product they're very competitive so the publishers are constantly trying to get one up on each other and make their products look more beautiful than the next guys they began to put hand coloring on they didn't have color printing yet but here's a very beautiful example from our collection of an early hand colored print from the early 1700s beginning in the 1740s they started experimenting with printing in color and here you see on the left a print with three different colors in addition to the black outline the breakthrough came in 1765 that was when on a large scale of the Japanese began to produce prints in full color full color is defined as five or more color blocks in addition to the black outline block and this artist Suzuki Haru Nobu was the first who designed prints that were printed in full color remember he didn't do the the printing himself but he designed them so there is one of the early limited color prints and then the gorgeous a full color print that you see for bigger images it was a customary not to try to print a whole big sheet of paper but to do it in sections there was a standard size roughly about about a 15 inches high by 10 inches wide or the other way around in the case of a horizontal print um that's the size of the Fuji prints it's about the size of a big manila envelope is is one description of it and the this was just about what one person could handle in the printing process so there's a very beautiful work from about 1789 this would be when Hokusai himself was a young artist but this was by the top artist of beautiful women of that time showing a group of people visiting in Oshima and you notice here the landscape is a background for the figures there were a few prints showing just landscape but it didn't become an important subject until Hocus I made it 1 in 1830 and also notice the perspective it's this is a kind of the traditional Asian perspective where you show that things are far away by putting them higher up in the picture plane so if you try to look at this in a rational way with modern Western eyes it almost looks as if the ground plane is tilted up but as we'll see a Western perspective was coming in already at that time now the interesting thing about these Japanese full-color prints is that in this respect the technology was actually slightly ahead of what was available in Europe the Japanese did not invent full-color printing there had actually been examples done in China sometime before but only on a relatively limited scale in Japan it became very popular very widespread and relatively inexpensive so these were something very very affordable and interestingly enough although fuller full-color printing was done in Europe it was still relatively expensive and so in the early 19th century a popular print if we're either just in black-and-white or if they were colored the coloring was put on by hand whereas the Japanese were doing full-color printing it was such a satisfactory way of producing full-color pictures that it actually persisted even after Western printing methods came to Japan so this is from the 1880s and it's that you can see it's that very same it's a woodblock color print a triptych it's exactly the same size as the one from a century before that we just saw and this lasted right up until the beginning of the 20th century at which point finally the woodblock prints were replaced by things like photographs and lithography and so on although they continued to be made as an art form so that is the the technology here by the way you also see by now the Western perspective is completely absorbed and is being used in the print so Hulka side becomes between these two prints that you've just seen here are his wonderful landscapes of the 1830s the way that the prints were made was already established and did not change in that hundred year period when he was working however there was something brand-new that led to his development of these landscapes and that was the new color it's known as Prussian blue in English the Japanese called Berlin blue it was one of those things that trickled in from Europe and remember as Professor Maxie explained last week it was luxury goods that were coming in the Japanese were self-sufficient but they liked interesting exotic goods and something like a beautiful pigment would have been very interesting to them and indeed was it was invented in Germany in the 18th century the Japanese had known about it for some time but it had been expensive what happened in the late 1820s it suddenly became much cheaper and apparently that was because not only was it coming in via the Dutch traders but also the Chinese began to import it to Japan as well so more of it was available the price went down and either hokusai or his publisher we don't know who but someone had the brilliant idea let's do landscape prints using this so the Fuji series was a huge bestseller landscape became an important subject matter in Japanese prints now that's Hokusai's use of technology printing technology I want to look just briefly at some very interesting examples of Hokusai's depictions of different kinds of technology focus I loved a ships and boats and he liked to draw them in detail so down below is another another two-page spread from that book of drawings that that set of drawings for a book that was never published and here are two prints from the Fuji series you see here both in this early a Fuji print and the draw of the drawing here that is a cargo boat with roofed a quarters for the crew and a detachable mass so that they can sail if they're in suitable circumstances and then here is a different type of boat that is a large heavy freighter carrying goods along the coast and hulk-sized very interested in all the details he loves to draw people working and he's very interested in drawing machinery so the waterwheel is of course one of the prints from the views of fuji and i was very interested to see that in the book of drawings and you by the way this two-page spread is exhibited so you can see these actual drawings here he shows what could be the same waterwheel but he has cut away the wall so that you can look inside and see what's going on and I think what they're doing using the water power is a threshing rice there are these these piston like things that are being turned by the waterwheel and pounding something I suspect what's going on there is loosening the hulls from the rice or some other and then on the facing page and really remember you read from right to left so really this this ought to come after that scene but this is a hand operated machine which was actually invented in China back in the 13th century but it is a winnowing machine once you separate the chaff from the grain then you it's still all mixed together and so you've got to get rid of those those inedible casings and the traditional way of doing it was to have your your threshed grain in a basket and toss it in the air so the wind would blow the chaff away but here was a nifty mechanical device that you could use when the wind was not blowing you pour the the grain all mixed with the hulls into this hopper at the top the man here is turning a crank and inside the round part there is a fan but it's all enclosed so that the air blows out the far end it blows away the chaff with it and the grain which is heavier drops down and here you see it coming out now Hocus eye often takes liberties with his drawings needless to say people going to all this trouble are not going to let their good rice go spilling out on the ground like that it would be falling into some kind of basket or container but he's drawn it this way so you can see what's going on so the mechanical a waterwheel he shows not only agricultural machinery but he then goes on to show the making of textiles there are a number of scenes of silk production culminating with this very interesting complicated a loom and then you see a store where the beautiful finished textiles are being stored now interestingly enough at the very same time that hokusai is making these drawings and drawing water wheels and looms and things of that kind in Japan in other parts of the world industrialization is just getting going you may have been to the some of the museums in Lowell Massachusetts this is one of them showing the mechanized looms and the mills in Lowell began to be built starting in 1821 so just at the time when Hokusai is doing those drawings of hand operated looms in Japan we're just starting the mechanical looms in this country and those were based directly on the earlier ones made in England just a short time before so the Japanese are behind the rest of the of the world or at least the more developed parts of the world but not by centuries but only by decades so here's what's going on very close to here the mills were operated by water power they were built in Lowell and in Lawrence because of the Swift flow of the Merrimack River at that point the river of water turned a big turbines when you go to the museum's they'll still show you these things it's very interesting and the turbines a through a system of gears would turn a drive shafts that then operate the individual looms so it is on water power so the Japanese have got the water power they've got the hand operated looms they're not that far away from this what they don't have yet or at least not on this scale is the turbines and the gears but they have the general idea already here is another page from that set of drawings by hokusai again showing his fascination with machinery and what we see here is uh it looks like figures until you look at the bottom of it and then you realize it's actually mechanical dolls and the little labels say things they says gears machinery puppets or dolls hollow puppets and Hollow presumably because there's a mechanism inside so in the 19th century um they made a number of these mechanical dolls in Japan you can find quite a bit of information about these online because they are often seen as a prototypes of Japanese developments in robotics so the one up here this is a tea serving doll and it would would walk forward carrying a tray with a cup of tea so you could actually be served tea by the doll the one below is especially interesting because it shoots an arrow it actually pulls arrows out of the quiver a draws the bow and you have to position the target correctly but it hits the target and I'll tell you more about that one in a moment the technology did come from Europe we apparently these began to be made in France in the early 18th century the earliest record I could find is in 1727 and inventor in France made mechanical dolls that served food that probably were very very similar to the Japanese tea serving doll I don't know whether anyone has found out exactly how this came to Japan but it's just the kind of luxury item that the Dutch would have imported and the Japanese were entirely capable of reverse engineering at figuring out how it worked and building their own so hokusai is these are not is not a serious diagram that's not actually it would be much more complicated to operate something like this but he gives you the general idea in terms of the iconography this is actually these are Chinese figures that are depicted in the mechanical dolls the fat guy with the big earlobes who is beating a drum when I was a child my brother had a battery-operated monkey that beat a drum so this is something very similar except it's clockwork rather than than batteries but that is hotei a one of the seven gods of good fortune in japan he's actually derived from an ancient chinese historical figure as in buddhist monk and there you see a painting of him and not by hokusai but by another Japanese artist around the same time he's this very jolly friendly character and he's often seen with Chinese children so here you see a Chinese child Acrobat and as he beats the drum this little mechanical figure does somersaults down a ladder and looks quite a bit like the Chinese child acrobats that Hokusai drew perched on the calligraphy for long life that was done by a a friend of his they was I believe the friend who did the calligraphy was I believe 98 and hoax I was 85 when he did this but just to show you the Chinese child a very similar look at that Chinese child acrobats and then the figure that shoots the arrow is another figure from Chinese mythology there were once extra suns in the sky it was too hot and so the gods asked a great Archer to shoot them all down except for one so that's what's going on this disc with the bird is one of the extra Suns there in Chinese mythology there's a crow and the Sun and so the the archer also is in Chinese costume shooting down the crow now the arrow shooting doll which I found online has a fascinating history um it is one of the treasures today of the Toshiba Corporation that electronics giant and it was built by one of their founders and there he is that's a photograph of what he looked like when he was that was an old man but hit when he was in his 20s again just at the time when Hokusai was doing these drawings just at the time that they were building mills in Lowell um this at the time young man was building mechanical dolls so he built the doll um that could shoot an arrow and I really wonder whether he could possibly have been the designer of the mechanical dolls that Hulk's eye depicts here we don't know but much later on this man he says she get actually designed the first steam engines that were built in Japan much later when the Japanese had decided that yes they would go ahead with industrialization and in 1875 he founded an engineering company that eventually in the 20th century merged with some other companies to become the Toshiba Corporation so that is as I said is one of their treasures today now dolls like this were expensive toys for wealthy people however there were also large dolls that were displayed in public displays one of the interesting things that's in the show you can see this print here it's rather large about like that um it's not especially beautiful because it was not printed in color it was cheap printing because what it was was an advertisement it was intended to be pasted on walls up kind of a billboard thing just to be stuck up here and there and it is an announcement of an exhibition of life-sized dolls that was going to be displayed in the fairgrounds behind the Great Temple of Sensoji in Asakusa so hokusai it usually was fairly minor artists who did these but somebody thought it was interesting enough and important enough that they commissioned Hokusai to do it um because he was very good at drawing Chinese figures these again are figures in Chinese costume and also he was very good at mechanical things of which he has drawn here so what these dolls represent and they were they were probably Lhari they're life-sized or close to it these were large dolls for a public display it's the Chinese lady in the moon and her entourage the lady in the moon according to Chinese mythology actually was the wife of the archer who shot down the extra Suns although sadly they became estranged of what happened was that the gods wish to reward the archer for helping them out and so they gave him the Lichter of immortality drinkin and you becoming immortal unfortunately when they came around to his house to deliver it no one was home so they left the precious bottle of elixir and went away the first one that came home you know what's coming was his wife she drank it and then she realized that immortal or not her husband was going to be very angry with her when he came home and she had better get out of there so she ran away and went to the moon and she became the lady in the moon so this was this was a good excuse for beautiful figures in Chinese costume and that is the carriage of the lady in the moon pulled by oxen and it advertises that it actually moves and then in keeping with this astrological or astronomical theme here are the seven stars of the Big Dipper but they are figures who perform a dance all mechanical dolls and the most interesting of all um the lady in the moon has attendants and these aren't mechanical dolls operating a silk reeling machine and this wonderful a miraculous silk reeling machine can make can real or can roll up six reels of silk at the same time again it's a gear system this a lady is turning the years and it operates these kind of spindles that roll up six a reels of silk at once this was a a remarkable you know almost miraculous thing in 1827 fifty years later the real thing the very latest in high technology of 1877 is being displayed in Japan at the Japanese national industrial exposition and this print by the way the very print that you see here that is currently at an exhibition in Japan on the arts of the Meiji period because it's such a great example of what happened in Japan in the 1870s which you'll be hearing more about in the future lectures but I love the fact that in 50 years we've gone from almost fantasy or really it is fantasy if you consider this is taking place on the moon as far as hoax is concerned so imagining what happens on the moon and showing what is really happening in Japan right now now Western perspective this can be seen as an aspect of Technology and certainly of a contact with the West as I mentioned traditional Asian perspective shows distant things by putting them high up in the plane of the picture plane the Japanese found out about a Western perspective in the 1740s again Western books and pictures were allowed into Japan provided they didn't mention a Christianity and for some reason this client why they didn't find out about it sooner I don't know but artists became interested in this technique in the 1740s it was not considered to be the great scientific philosophical discovery that it was seen as in Renaissance Europe the Japanese saw it is just a kind of fun game a kind of an optical illusion you could use it for stage sets you could use it in toys as we'll see in just a minute but there was a whole group of rather large perspective pictures like this that began to be made in Japan in the 1740s I love this one because it's a mix of a Western and Asian perspective as you can see the in the main part of the picture the the receding lines converge they go toward what ought to be a vanishing point on the horizon about here however the landscape that you're seeing through or on the far side of this a balcony so this is an elegant a restaurant or other building of some kind on the river in the summer people are enjoying the lovely cool air after a hot day but in the background landscape it's completely in the old perspective so you you kind of don't have a horizon for the the converging lines to vanish toward so it's a it's a not quite fully understood yet here is a work from the 1750s and now you can see this artist does really completely understand it he gets it that is actually a print it's not a Nokia web print it was made in Kyoto by this artist Maru Yama ochio he later became a very famous very successful artists are really the top artists in Japan in the 18th century but as a young man he did work for a toy store and one of the toys sold in the store was little Peep Show gadgets a little box that you would put a picture in you would look through a lens and usually there would be a mirror inside also the grid across the top is to let light in but not too much light and here is that same print this is the real one in our collection this is a replica and the reason they've reversed it is it would be reversed when you looked at it in the little box because there's a mirror inside there as well as the lens so these were called floating pictures because when you look through the lens this is a modern mock-up you'd see something like that it was as if there was another little world in there Japanese really liked these things but you know they didn't take it very seriously it was just kind of a fun a toy and here actually is one of the little peep show boxes this is an early work by hokusai it shows three little boys who are actually acting out a a play but they have some other toys lying around on the floor that they were playing with before they decided to put the play on and right here behind this kid's posterior you see the little box with the grid on the top and then the little lens that you would look through to see a magical looking scene inside out here's another work by tomorrow showing an older sister as a two little boys look into a bigger box and there were also much bigger ones that again were displayed at the carnivals that you could look into so those are the peeps Obama's in the 1780s there was a fad for these perspective prints and a hoax I drew quite a lot of them he turned out to have a knack for this so I've been saying that landscape prints were not important but they were one of the things that were being made they weren't nearly as popular or best-selling as Prince of kabuki actors and prints of beautiful women but things like this did provide a good income for struggling young artists like Hulk acai so often they were scenes of the city of Edo that actually is the temple where the mechanical dolls were displayed the area back behind the temple buildings with the trees is where the fairgrounds were was one of the most famous booted probably the most famous Buddhist temple in the city this is a historical story that was also a very famous kabuki play but Hokusai is showing it in this interesting way as if it were real and then I love this one because it's such a combination of realism and fantasy he uses the illusionistic vanishing point perspective but it's a haunted house with all these terrific hokusai style monsters coming out in the early 1800s he did some small prints that were very deliberately imitating a western styles this is from a set of Sioux Dimona the privately commissioned prints and it you can barely see it as I think one of the ends stirs of the great wave is beautiful embossing the sunomono used very expensive techniques because the customers paid for them upfront it's one of a set but you'll notice it has a frame which Japanese pictures did not usually and then to make it look Western he wrote his signature sideways at this period Japanese was normally written up and down occasionally you would write things across but there is the sideways signature and furthermore instead of writing it in Chinese derived characters the way he usually would this is this is what his a signature would look like normally but he spelled it out in the phonetic script which is more cursive looking in addition to writing it sideways um now this is a wrapper for a complete set of eight tiny little prints they're about little prints about like that that directly imitate Western prints by this time some of those Japanese who were studying Dutch studies which you learned about last time had actually learned to do copper plate edgings and engravings and those were being sold in the city of Edo often quite small they were still kind of experimenting with the technique these are woodblock prints but they are deliberately imitating the western-style engravings and etchings that are being sold and it cracks me up hokusai used the horizontal lines that you use for shading when you are doing for example an etching it's completely unnecessary in Japanese woodblock printing because the printer can put gradated ink on the block when he prints it but that was a Western technique that hokusai was using and then the strange clouds without lines are also a Western technique so he's imitating them this is the wrapper that the prints were sold in and the title is the Dutch the Dutch picture mirror actually you could also say the Dutch picture lens because the word the Japanese word for mirror was also used to mean a lenses so you would expect it to be one of those little peep show gadgets that we just looked at but as you can see that's not what he shows that's a microscope and he knew it was a microscope I'll prove that shortly so he's looking at the city of Edo a through the the Dutch microscope what he does with that Western perspective after drawing all those floating pictures um years later in the 1830s when he has the beautiful blue to work with and again it's it's not a jump he's been doing book illustrations all along and other kinds of prints but he incorporates the Western perspective into the fuji prints and i am convinced that one of the reasons why japanese prints were really the the first non-western art form that european artists discovered i think partly although they didn't realize it at the time and thought these were terribly exotic but i think they could look at them and understand them because how cuz i was using western perspective or something very close to it now he's doing it completely by eye so if you if you try to do something like trace the lines all the way to the horizon it won't quite come out properly but it's close enough that you can read it that way and it's highly intelligible to people who are used to a western style perspective so I think these things were actually rather a familiar to the Western viewers Hocus i however was perfectly willing to fiddle with it by this time he totally understood how to do it but he also felt free to change things if he wanted to this is a beautiful example of one of the waterfall prints it's the Amidah Falls which is called that because according to legend a priest saw a vision of Amida Buddha at that waterfall here's a photograph of the fall as it appears today it's still very beautiful still a sightseeing attraction and you can see it does come out of a gap in the rocks just as hokusai has drawn but the gap is pretty irregular it's not beautiful and round as Hocus I drew it so there are two possibilities one is that maybe it eroded over the past century and a half maybe it was once rounder but I think probably not I think hokusai distorted reality deliberately and made it round to suggest the halo of the Buddha in the vision that the priest saw he's also done something else when you in reality when you look straight at the waterfall you do not see the stream above it that's feeding into it and hokusai even though he perfectly well understands Western perspective is also completely happy to violate it and to go back to the old system of showing just showing things higher up when they're far away and so we get the beautiful rippling of the stream coming into the waterfall is strictly speaking it's not realistic but who cares folks I was very interested in lenses in optics and this might have something to do with the fact that as a child he was adopted by his uncle who was a mirror maker who made highly polished metal mirrors for the household of the Shogun so focus I had a very good education and he was being trained to be a mirror maker but he decided he didn't want to do that however he kept his interest in reflections we have the beautiful painting a very gorgeous expensive work of a woman looking at her reflection in the mirror and here is an example from the Fuji series that features a reflection but it's also a case when hokusai plays with reality um the real mountain is the way it appears in the summer in high summer when all the snow has melted off it but look at the reflection this is our image of Fuji in the other three seasons of the year when it has snow on it and just as a further clue the reflection is a little bit skewed it's not directly under the mountain but slightly off so it's a very witty comment on your image of how things look and how they really look and the fact that this may be a little off there is that microscope that was on the wrapper of the minotaur pictures and here unfortunately this is not in our collection but this is a Sudha Mona a privately commissioned print of by Hokusai of a microscope with a butterfly a little does that where butterfly realize it is probably just about to be pinned down and examined under the microscope but just to prove that yes he did know what that gadget was telescopes were also familiar to hokusai this is a Sudha Mona in our collection showing a telescope in a still life with other objects and here is a book illustration showing a group of ladies looking through a telescope they don't have it pointed at Fuji in the background but if they did they might see something like that um this is the these are the second and third most famous prints in the Fuji series after the great wave but if you think about it when you look at Fuji in real life unless you happen to be in a plane flying past it you see much more of the landscape than just the mountain itself so where did hocus I get the idea of showing it like that maybe he looked through a telescope that's entirely possible and I think it's very likely now just briefly I want to mention a couple of other things that we see in a Hokusai's work and these have to do not so much with technology but with some of the things that we're going on in Japan during hulk-sized lifetime that will have an impact on the developments later in the century one of those things is travel here's another map showing the five major roads that were maintained by the government and were heavily used especially by the daimyo the provincial wards who were required to go back and forth spending half their time with the Shogun and half their time a governing their domains so these were the roads that were officially and maintained by the government the Tokaido is the most famous one the eastern sea road going from Edo along the coast to Kyoto then there was also a mountain route and some roads are going up to the north we know that Hulk Sai himself travelled he went to Kyoto and Osaka on business he stopped off in Nagoya which is right about here um and had a publishers publishing his books also people wanting to study painting from him in those cities and toward the end of his life he went to a place called Abu say which is a near present-day Nagano up in the north around this area so he was a very familiar with a travel um this is an a photograph from 1865 showing the Tokaido Road as it actually looked at that time it's from a different angle but just like the print that Hokusai shows here is a traveller dressed in a traveling costume a big hat sort of like wearing an umbrella it would protect you from Sun and the rain you would want a cloak you would have a leggings and socks with straw sandals tied over them however if you look carefully you will see that it's not actually a Japanese traveler that is out that is William Sturges Bigelow during his stay in Japan between 1882 and 1889 the the man who donated about 80% of the works in the exhibition and overall overall about 60% of our total enormous a Japanese print collection we've had many donors of the total is over 1200 and I think roughly about 20 different donors in the hokusai exhibition but he was the the biggest one of all and the core and so there he is when he lived in Japan we considered using this photo for our a wall label about him but in the end we went with the more dignified a shot of him as he looked in later yours as a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts oh and just to show you details of how people traveled on the Tokaido Road um although Japan had a good system of highways you couldn't it wasn't easy to use wheeled vehicles at least not for much of the way Japan is very mountainous even going along the coastal route it was often quite steep um so mostly people walked that was the typical a way to get around well-off people might go in a sedan chair you see there is a person sitting in this little contrivance and two men will carry it on a pole that is the more elegant way to travel and you could also go part way on a horse now only high-ranking samurai were permitted actually to ride horses on their own but pack horses were commonly used to transport luggage although anything really bulky or heavy went by boat we saw the cargo boats that Hocus I drew but as long as the horse was being led by a pack horse driver you could you could sort of travel as if you were baggage yourself and you know sit there with your luggage and as in many of his prints hooks I has put in a little joke you see this little symbol it looks just like a kind of decorative mark but it's actually the trademark of the publisher and the character on the horses saddle blanket is also one of the characters from the the name of Hokusai's publisher but just the fact that japan did have a good road system connecting the different parts of the country this was something that was going to be very important later on in getting these developed these modernization and the various developments spread to different areas why did people travel they traveled on business as in Hokusai's case often they went on pilgrimage is a very interesting a topic that definitely people have researched somewhat already and more research can be done but pilgrimage was often an excuse for tourism tourism was really getting going in hook sized day but often the official excuse for going on a trip when really you wanted to see the beautiful sights would be that you would visit a famous temple or shrine Japan a hat and has two religions that coexist Buddhism and Shinto the conventional translation for places of worship Buddhist temples Shinto shrines and especially in the Edo period they often were found together so this particular waterfall again another one from the waterfall series is on mount ole yama which was fairly close to EDD oh you basically could get there in a day and then come back the next day um so it was a popular pilgrimage spot and here you see these men who are pilgrims who have climbed up the mountain and now they are in the sacred waterfall which must have felt really good after climbing up the mountain on a hot day this is a boardgame a by hokusai and it's a trip from edo here you see Oedo and you go like this all the way to mount o yama you don't see the waterfall but there is the entire mountain up in the corner and then a hulk-sized little invention that makes this different from other board games is then you go back again so this is the route the route home again after you've made the pilgrimage so one of the reasons why people traveled of course people also wanted to see the special scenic spots there was a long tradition in Japan of poets writing poetry about beautiful scenery and hokusai a drew a beautiful scenery this is his series Snow Moon and flowers Snow Moon and flowers were the three most beautiful things according to Chinese poetry um but hokusai showed them in terms of Japanese landscapes so it's snow on the Sumida River in Eadie it's the moon over the Yodo River a close to Kyoto and then flowers in Japan usually means cherry blossoms in China admit flowers in general in Japan when you talk about flowers its cherry blossoms the most famous ones of all are in the mountains of Yoshino which is down south of Kyoto and so that's what a Hokusai shows but one of the results of increased travel during the Edo period and I think especially of the beautiful landscape scenes that hooks I and other artists start drawing is that people in Japan begin to get more and more of a sense of their country as a unified whole and gradually start to think of themselves not just as belonging to a one particular province or one particular area but begin to get this idea of something a unified now we also see that in stories the print culture is important in bringing a nation together including both traditional stories and also new things based on traditional stories Hocus I was very well known as a book illustrator this is actually from a book by another artist Kuniyoshi published in 1845 and there you see Hokusai not as the very old man that he was in 1845 focus I was 86 or 85 excuse me and there you see him as he looked several decades earlier on and together with the author that he especially collaborated with b'keen who wrote a new kind of fiction that became very popular in the early 19th century and it was adventure stories often with a historical setting usually set in the distant past and often with the fantasy element so the book The Crescent Moon Bou written by b'keen illustrated by hokusai was about a real historical figure of the 12th century however the the real samurai Minamoto tomato moe was killed in the Civil Wars at that time but this is a spinoff from his history they see him as living on and traveling to the island south of Japan going to what the UQ Islands and two other fantasy islands such as the island of the demons tomato mo the historical tomato mo was a great Archer so he keeps that characteristic in the fantasy story and there are the demons who can't even bend his bow because he is so powerful at one point he shipwrecked when a sea monster overturns his a ship and so this is Hokusai's book illustration the artist Kuniyoshi was very indebted to hulks i Kuniyoshi became famous for his warrior prints showing exploits of great heroes of the past or illustrations of these fantastic novels so there's hulk-sized book illustration here's the color print that Kuniyoshi made of the the shipwreck caused by the sea monster clearly based on it then later on Kuniyoshi did another version which is a little more original which is one of his major works the a hero by the way is saved by these are flying creatures and goes on to have still more adventures and I want at this point to put in a quick plug for fantasy this kind of thing which was very very popular in early 19th century Japan this is often seen as escapist or foolish or you know why are people why are young people today not thinking about practical things instead of you know indulging in these wild fantasies um I think it's good to stretch your imagination and I think the fact that that people in early 19th century Japan enjoyed reading about and looking at pictures of wild fantastic adventures I think it stood them in good stead later in that century when a lot of things happened in Japan that were certainly very strange compared to what had been going on before and so you know the kid who reads about this Japanese hero traveling around to places like the island of the demons is you know likely to be you know brave and daring and go off and travel to Europe to a study technology so I think it's a good thing hokusai himself only did one a series of warrior prints and you see a gorgeous example there this again is a historical figure his name is Watanabe note suna and he was a real person but he is a store his real story was greatly embroidered on there many stories of him fighting demons and so on so hoax I drew him with a human opponent here is suna fighting another another armored figure but he continues to appear in manga and so forth today and just by quickly browsing online I was able to find quickly two modern depictions of this hero so that that unifying function of the storytelling when people are have a sort of national heroes that everybody knows about it's one of those things like being aware of the different geographical areas of your country are aware of these these heroes that everyone can acclaim just by being Japanese and here are some modern versions I was particularly intrigued by the one on the upper right because I strongly suspect that the artist had looked at Hokusai's print because of the color scheme so you can see what you think so these are the things that Hocus I did that hint at what is to come and you'll hear about more in the following lectures thank you so we have time for a few questions we have a microphone on either side so please raise your head and we will bring the mic to you did the Japanese prohibit Christianity because they were possibly aware of some of the abuses of missionaries toward native populations I suspect so that was part there were many reasons I think actually I think that was part of it I think the single biggest reason was that the Tokugawa's did not want any of the other warlords who might be their competitors to make an alliance with the European countries that was the biggest thing remember during the period of extensive contact contact with Europe there was a civil war going on in Japan and the different factions were you know gleefully making deals with the Europeans to try to get try to you know they were all struggling to try to take control of Japan once the Tokugawa's did then yes however I think that was also a factor I think they suspected the missionaries were ultimately up to no good and the I can tell you what what was the last straw the crackdown on Christianity was gradual they got more and more strict about it and the last straw that led them to ban it completely was a peasant revolt in that southern island of Kyushu down in an area down south of Nagasaki which was led by a charismatic teenage boy who claimed to be the second coming of Christ and they decided that's it no more Christianity if this is what it leads to forget it so so thank thank you for that great lecture you always one always reads that Hokusai influenced the Impressionists and the post-impressionists but looking at some of those beautiful colors notably the Reds and the hot pinks clearly he also influenced the fava Staz well and I found that so interesting mm-hmm you know well I agree and I definitely more more can be there is more that can be done in studying these things one thing that I for this exhibition and and for most of the prints that I showed you I carefully picked things that were not faded I think one of the big attractions of the Japanese prints was that they were so colorful and we don't always real at realize that because for example a Monet's collection is still there you can see it on the walls in his dining room but it's all faded whereas when it when he put it up it would have been very bright and colorful so yes that's a good point and I agree the wonderful woodblock exhibition at the at the end of the the overall exhibition could a scholar or kind of serve neither of which I am look at an original print without the advantage of having the individual blocks and discerned how many there were because I would not have been able to figure that out on under the wave oh you mean help how many blocks were used for the original print exactly there there are such subtleties yeah you well as I said basically count the colors but sometimes it's hard and also every now and then may cheat it a little bit if there was for example a small area of a color in one corner and a small area of a different color in another corner they might use one block for two colors usually not but you could get away with that if they were far enough apart that you could ink them without any danger of interfering and they did there were various techniques such as the gradation that can make it difficult also sometimes they did things like print one color over the other so it's difficult yes you can pretty much tell but people do argue about it and it's entirely possible that two experts might disagree about exactly how many color blocks were used so whilst urges Bigelow was hoovering up this wonderful collection of it is we are all enjoying now would he have been interested in or understood the the techniques of manufacture and moreover the the scholarship behind some of some of the individual prints that you exposed us children um I think he did understand the technique um I I don't know who would have demonstrated it for him but I think he was aware of how they were done I don't know when you say the scholarship I assume you mean things like the stories that hoax ayahs depicting how much of that he knew about I don't know um but a certainly some of it you things like the tuition good a story was so famous that everyone would have known about that and there was even an english-language version published as early as 1871 so we would have had some knowledge of it but probably not in detail I have two questions one of the concerns the opening up of Japan to the West yes and in my reading it focused on the American contribution black ships but it occurs to me and I'm wonderful so that there might be a relationship between the Japanese interest in the Industrial Revolution and the fact as I understand that they lack coal and iron so that if they were going to have Industrial Revolution they needed to trade in order to get raw materials is that so or do you know okay this is this is more of a question for a political historian um what the Japanese did have and that interestingly enough was also very important in early industrialization here was water power so that that went along it's true that they that they lacked other things but they did have that and that went a long way um I think the fact that it was Matthew Perry who finally succeeded in getting Japan to open up that it was an American and not some other sea captain of a different nationality was somewhat coincidental because other foreigners other foreign countries had been trying and I think again the Shogun was very well aware of what was going on around them um and they probably realized that sooner or later they were going to have to establish some kind of contact so what went through their minds and why they agreed to make a deal with him when other people had been put off I'm not sure thank you the other question is personal Japanese men tend to be bald like I am or is that just the way they just the way they painted them conventionally it was the standard male hair style in the Edo period did they shave yes they shaved and occasionally actually you know it's it's way far back so I don't know if we can if I can find it but that wonderful three color print of the warrior if you look very carefully he has five o'clock shadow on his head if I get to it's way back toward there there gets a look and and yes the head is shaved now there's why that was the standard male hairstyle I don't know um it would start a teenage boy who's you know approaching adulthood or past puberty but not yet legally adult would have the very top of his head shaved what would still have a lock of hair in front neatly tied up of course and then in the adulthood ceremony the whole head the whole top of the head would be shaved I heard a rumor but I never saw any substantiation of this that the hairstyle was started by a Shogun who was himself going bald and wanted everyone to look like him but but I don't really know you mentioned about being able to identify people in Chinese costume and I wonder what the difference is between Chinese dress and Japanese dress that would make one of us able to differentiate the two and also I wanted to comment about the spinning of the silk and the women being the ones working in what I would call the factory mm-hmm right okay different the differentiation between the Chinese dress and the Japanese dress can you illustrations of that okay verbal or right these are these are Chinese costumes or at least I should say this is the Japanese idea of Chinese costume which is not not necessarily authentic um the the well the way the hairstyles are done is different although I'm not at all sure those are actual Chinese women's hairstyles but they're just they're different from the way that the Japanese hairstyle would be done it's kind of all piled up with with floral decorations there's a very distinct pattern to the Japanese hair style you have the front the sides the top and the topknot and it whereas this is more piled up also notice see the round collar that's a Chinese or at least what the Japanese thought was a Chinese woman's outfit there would be a well you may have seen actual Chinese women's jackets which typically have a round collar and fastened at the at the side near the shoulder whereas the Japanese women are wearing kimono and you you pretty much know what a kimono looks like it has the it laps over and makes a v-shape in front and then let's see what else actually these are fantasy Chinese women because look they're wearing shoes or they're wearing big shoes and you can see their feet real Chinese women at that time would have had bound feet and their and their feet would have been hidden under their skirts probably if they were wearing long skirts so those are some also the the sleeves are different again the Chinese women are wearing a sort of a fitted jacket or bodice whereas the the way a kimono is put together is a sort of strips of cloth very loosely sewn is that enough to to go by and then even things like the textile patterns those medallion patterns are very Chinese patterns as yes it's extremely interesting that the Japanese used a women to operate the machines that was also what was being done in the other industrial countries it was the mill girls in Lowell who were operating the machines here and it basically it was because women would work cheaper than men there may also have been issues like manual dexterity and I'm sorry to say in many cases it was children who were operating the machines partly because they had tiny little fingers and also partly because again they would work for cheap or could be made to work for cheap I have the mic over here I am wondering if in hulk-sized tremendous output of work if he also did any series of the erotic prints and do you have them in your collection yes and yes he did lots of erotic prints it's represented in the exhibition with one erotic book we actually it's we have a wonderful collection of Japanese erotica that was assembled by William Sturges Bigelow and was brought here in 1909 which was technically illegal but Bigelow was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt and the President himself pulled strings to let mr. Bigelow bring in the collection it came straight was came from the docs straight to the museum was immediately put under lock and key it was for educational purposes yes somewhat disappointingly we don't have a lot of erotica specifically by Hokusai although we do have a number of fine things by other artists we have the book that I put on display in the exhibition is the best erotic piece by Hulk aside that we have of the question that everyone always asks and that even came up in the Boston Globe Review is do we have the famous octopus picture um no it's a book illustration he focus I had an amazing imagination he really did draw a picture of a woman having sex with an octopus and um no we do not own it would we exhibit it if we did yes we wouldn't I'm sure it would be a huge draw but but since we don't have it it's not relevant thank you so much thank you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 78,944

Keywords: Hokusai (Visual Artist), Art, Museum, Lecture, Japanese Art (Art Period/Movement), Printmaking (Visual Art Form), Woodblock Printing (Visual Art Medium), Woodblock Printing In Japan (Visual Art Medium), Japan (Country), Curator (Profession)

Id: sM_z56RdKLs

Length: 82min 36sec (4956 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2015