日本藝術(shù)家

葛飾北齋

Katsushika Hokusai （1760-1849）

Katsushika Hokusai (1760u20131849) was celebrated as a great print designer, book illustrator, and painter. His works had a deep and lasting effect not only on Japanese art but also on modern Western art. Hokusai was the first Japanese printmaker who endeavored to show the spectrum of human types and experiences in his work, and he was also the first to produce a significant series of pure landscape prints. Among the prints in Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji are some of the most famous landscape prints in world history. Yet this and all of Hokusai’s most successful landscape print series were commenced after his seventieth birthday.

Hokusaiu2019s synthesis of Western and Japanese stylistic features in his landscape prints sprang from his fifty years of experience as an artist, his exhaustive study of all school styles of Japanese painting, and his involvement in a revolutionary trend toward scientific analysis that swept Japan in the 1770s and 1780s. Part of that trend included the import and study of Dutch copper-plate etchings and the Chinese prints from Suzhou based on them, which instructed Japanese artists in methods of Western-style perspective. Details in Hokusaiu2019s prints such as clouds and waves, as well as modeling and shading, were in some cases drawn from the same Dutch etchings. He combined these Western elements with traditional Japanese decorative treatments of landscape features, making a conscious effort to be dramatic and evocative. The effects are often riveting and memorable.

Hokusai is also famous for his personal eccentricity. He was recorded as having moved ninety-three times, and he changed his name about thirty times. Although his works were in demand, he lived in constant poverty because he moved so often. Hokusai was a member of the artisan class of commoners, the third of four ranks in Edo period (1615u20131868) Japanese society. He spent his entire life among city commoners and recorded their lives in innumerable illustrated books and prints. His books became instruction manuals and design inspiration for several generations of painters, carvers of miniature sculpture (netsuke), lacquerers, and printmakers.