Hokusai

Essay for Thomas Cartwright's painting exhibition titled '36 View of Table Mountain' (2014). I consider the influence of Hokusai's 36 views of Mount Fuji, particularly his incorporation of both Western and Chinese techniques of perspective. I draw comparison to the way Cezanne resolved his concerns of looking and painting Mount Saint Victoire. I end with a discussion of the perceptions of Table Mountain within the City of Cape Town today.

L’arte Ukiyo-e {浮世絵}, interpreta in maniera libera i piaceri e i passatempi dell’emergente ceto borghese urbano. Si prediligono soggetti di vita mondana, tratte da teatri di kabuki o dai quartieri dei bordelli di Edo.
L’impetuoso movimento Ukiyo-e si diffuse da Edo a gran parte dell’arcipelago nipponico. Di conseguenza, si può affermare che l’ Ukiyo-e non fu altro che la silenziosa testimonianza figurativa delle fugaci libertà e piacevoli distrazioni che la nascente classe mercantile iniziò gradualmente a concedersi nell’isolato Giappone dell’epoca Edo.
Katsushika Hokusai si specializzò nella realizzazione di stampe Ukiyo-e quando, appena maggiorenne, entrò nella celebre bottega Katsukawa. Estremamente insofferente a direttive e ordini, Hokusai decise preso di
mettersi in proprio seguendo le sue aspirazioni religiose, producendo xilografie a soggetto paesaggistici e naturale.
L’innovazione nei soggetti rappresentati portò l’artista alla massima notorietà, ed egli divenne il pittore prediletto dallo shōgun. Raggiunse l’apice della carriera alla veneranda età di sessant’anni: proprio a quel
periodo risale il suo massimo capolavoro ”Trentasei vedute del Monte Fuji”, dove in realtà le stampe sono quarantasei, che raffigura la montagna sacra giapponese in stagioni e condizioni metereologiche differenti, da luoghi e distanze variabili.
La stampa più celebre proveniente dalla serie è sicuramente “La grande onda di Kanagawa”.
Nel 1812 il pittore si era trasferito a Nagoya, dove fu sollecitato dai propri allievi a realizzare la raccolta “Educazione dei principianti
tramite lo spirito delle cose: Schizzi sparsi di Hokusai” successivamente diffusasi col nome ‘Manga di Hokusai per imparare a disegnare’, abbreviabile semplicemente in “Manga”, Il vocabolo manga fu coniato nel 1815 da Hokusai unendo due kanji: man- {漫} strano o buffo e -ga
{画} immagine, quindi “immagini a contenuto umoristico”.

"The problem of the orientation in the liquid society. Self-transcending and having care as exercise of transformation
Lyotard’s thesis of «économie libidinale» proposes to resolve the problem of the orientation through an unlimited extension of the pleasure. Whatever limits the pleasure would be only a moralistic fabulation. This model does contrast with the ascetic capitalism of the first modernity, but not with the capitalism of the second modernity represented by the broker Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. This paper tries to show that the sentiment and the pleasure aren’t a negativity to repress but are a positivity to be taken care and to be formed. The pleasure, which is positive in itself, degenerates in negativity and in depression if there is no care – care in the sense proposed by Pierre Hadot. One type of limitation of the pleasure which doesn’t follow the logic of repression is present in the erotic phenomenon. The eroticism is based on the momentary postponement of the pleasure. In not satisfying automatically the need with the first available form of pleasure a man has the possibility to choose what is more important for him and in this way to experience his own desire and to become conscious of himself. To exercise the function of preferring means for an individual not to suffer blindly the logic of the need, but to humanize and to singularize the pleasure, i.e. to form his own desire. By forming his own desire the individual forms himself. The theme dealt with in the ancient philosophy, under the concept of epimeleia heautou can be interpreted in this perspective as the care of the desire, which is directed toward a transformation of the individual, toward a second birth. This care requests an act of self-transcending, distancing critically oneself from the own self, a push given by the otherness. I propose to call an otherness of this kind with the name of «exemplarity». The exemplarity doesn’t refer to a form of authoritarian verticality – as the models of social success do – but implies a form of horizontality that expresses solidarity. The representation of this form of orientation isn’t the ladder to the paradise of Climachus, but, if anything, the breaking wave of Hokusai. "

This study explores the evolution of the manufacturing process of artificial arsenic sulfide pigments in Edo-period Japan through the analysis of three impressions of the same print dated from the 1830s and attributed to Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), and one from 1852 and attributed to Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865). Colorants in the yellow and green areas of the four prints were investigated by means of non-invasive and microanalytical techniques such as optical microscopy, fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. While the pigments in the green and yellow areas are similar throughout the set of prints-Prussian blue, indigo (for the Hokusai prints) and orpiment were identified-optical microscopy and Raman spectroscopy highlighted some variations in the orpiment used in the green areas of the prints. Two of the Hokusai prints present bright yellow particles of larger size and lamellar morphology, identified by Raman spectroscopy as natural orpiment. The third print presents an admixture of bright yellow natural orpiment particles with a smaller number of orange-yellow particles shown by Raman to be partially amorphous arsenic sulfide. Small bright yellow particles identified as fully amorphous arsenic sulfide pigments by Raman were found throughout the green areas of the Kunisada print. Although supported by Japanese historical sources, local production of artificial arsenic sulfide in the early nineteenth century was not previously documented. The simultaneous presence of both crystalline and amorphous domains in a single pigment particle in some of the Hokusai prints suggests that natural orpiment was used as primary source of arsenic for the production of a low grade artificial pigment. The pigment found in the Kunisada print, by contrast, was obtained from arsenic oxide (or arsenolite) and sulfur though a dry-process synthesis, as shown by the sulfur excess, signs of heat treatments and fully amorphous nature of the pigment. These findings set the earliest dates for both the ore sublimation process and the arsenolite dry process, and are of foremost importance to understand the evolution of the amorphous arsenic sulfide production in Edo-period Japan and its introduction in the palette of Japanese woodblock prints.

“The Interrelations between the Reception of Kawanabe Kyōsai and the Appreciation of Hokusai in Late Nineteenth-century Europe" (Jūkyū-seiki kōhan no yōroppa ni okeru Kawanabe Kyōsai no juyō to Hokusai hyōka no kakawari), Ukiyo-e Art (Ukiyo-e geijutsu), No.159, Tokyo: International Ukiyo-e Society, January 2010, 34-47.

「19世紀後半のヨーロッパにおける河鍋暁斎の受容と北斎評価の関わり」、『浮世絵芸術』159号、国際浮世絵学会発行、2010年1月、34-47頁。

Marià Fortuny, a painter in the forefront of the European avant-garde of the early 1870s, is also considered a key figure in the introduction of Japonisme in Spain and Italy. This study aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of Marià Fortuny’s links to Japanese art and the phenomenon of Japonisme. To this end, the article provides new information about Fortuny’s collection of Japanese art and considers the influence that these pieces had on the Catalan painter’s own work.

This study combines scientific and connoisseurship approaches to establish a production chronology of 141 wood-block prints from Katsushika Hokusai's series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji belonging to different cultural institutions in Europe and the United States. In order to create this chronology, the reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) signature of the indigo/Prussian blue mixture of the key-block printed outlines was measured and compared using multivariate data analysis. This approach yielded 9 clusters of prints, each one presenting slightly different FORS features, and therefore, different Prussian blue/indigo mixtures. The connoisseurship approach was then applied to impressions of the same print found across the 9 clusters. This allowed for arrangement of the clustered prints according to their production time, resulting in a comprehensive timeline for the 141 prints examined. To date, this work represents the only systematic study of such a large corpus of Japanese/Hokusai woodblock prints integrating chemical analysis and statistical treatment of data with careful visual examination of the prints. The result is a novel approach to creating a chronology for these objects. Our study easily differentiated between early nineteenth and early twentieth century prints as well as between various printing batches/clusters. Creating a chronology of such an important print series is also crucial to understand the evolution of artist and printing studio practices in late nineteenth-century Japan, a period of great economic and cultural changes.