The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai
KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, 1831. WOODBLOCK PRINT.
Amongst the most reproduced works of art in all of history, it is easy in the face of such abundance to forget the sheer revolutionary importance of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The first in series of thirty six views of Mount Fuji that Hokusai produced, and printed in an edition of roughly 100 from the original woodblock, the work gained immediate praise in his native Japan and shortly after in Europe, where it inspired the Impressionist movement. The print, as with others in the series, used the color Prussian Blue for the first time in Japanese print art, bringing a boldness to the medium that had not been seen before. Too, it combined traditional Japanese printing techniques with a European graphical perspective, synthesising the two continents disparate styles into a single work that could speak loudly across cultures. These two novel changes marked a shift in art history and a movement not to a homogenised global style but certainly towards a common language.