What do you think?
Rate this book
Hokousaï L'art japonais au XVII Siècle
Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au format numérique par Ebooks libres et gratuits. L’achat de l’édition Kindle inclut le téléchargement via un réseau sans fil sur votre liseuse et vos applications de lecture Kindle.
316 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1986
10 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
About the author
Edmond de Goncourt
640 books37 followersFrench writer and literary and art critic Edmond-Louis-Antoine Huot de Goncourt published books and founded the Académie Goncourt. His brother is Jules de Goncourt.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 9, 2015
The book is very specific, and I don't think that books about art and artists should look like that, but I learned a lot about Hokusai from it (which is probably an easy task even for the worst art book in the world, as my knowledge about Hokusai was previously limited to his picture The Great Wave, you know). The book tells a little about Hokusai himself, and the rest of it consists mostly of reproductions of pictures and text descriptions of hundreds of other pictures: it is very boring and interesting reading at the same time -- boring because it's fucking descriptions of pictures!! pages and pages of them! and interesting because even by these descriptions you can imagine the depth of Hokusai's immense talent. Sometimes I almost cried due to impossibility to see all these treasures with my own eyes...
So, on Hokusai. The more I think about what I learned about Hokusai, the less words I can find, except for WOW.
Hokusai’s works were of staggering quantity and diversity. Illustrations of books (novels and poems), publications of his own illustrated stories, manga, isolated pictures, albums, surimonos (luxurious stamps, made on high quality paper, using exceptional pigments, often enhanced with gold and silver, embossing, and great delicacy in the engraving), series of plates, prints and panels, decorative fans, decks of cards, screens (японские ширмы), sketchbooks, kakemonos (traditional Japanese scrolles which are usually are hung on the wall vertically), makimonos (traditional Japanese scrolles up to 20 meters long which are for reading in the horizontal direction unscrolling gradually; they often include large panoramic pictures), shunga (erotic paintings) -- and so on, tons and volumes of them.
"Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of ninety volumes; he collaborated on about thirty volumes: yellow books and popular books at first; eastern and western promenades, glimpses of famous places, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes and heroines and the thirty-six women poets and one hundred poets, with songbooks and multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of new fashion, books on education, morals, anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches.
Hokusai tried everything, and succeeded. He was tireless, multitalented, and brilliant."
He was not only talented but also highly professional: he could draw with any tools, in any scales, using any media (paints, ink, pencils, whatever). Imagine this performance of him:
"...a man was presented with a box divided into four compartments containing red, blue, black, and white sand. In throwing it on the floor as a farmer spreads seed, he drew and painted both flowers and birds, and in the end, amid noisy laughter, men and women."
The book also describes very spectacular events when Hokusai created huge paintings: images of such size that it is difficult even understand how he felt the scale and proportions so well, and drew an accurate and elegant but humongous picture without much preparation:
"In 1817, during one of Hokusai’s trips to Nagoya, the painter received an order for many book illustrations. Since his students vaunted the accuracy of representation of the beings and things in his drawings, particularly those in small formats, critics of ‘vulgar painting’ retorted that the little things produced by Hokusai’s brush were crafts and not art. These words hurt Hokusai and led him to say that, if a painter’s talent consisted in the size of the dimensions of his strokes and his works, he was ready to surprise his critics. This was when his student, Bokusen, and his friends came to help him execute, in public, a tremendous painting, a Darma of very different proportions than the one he painted in 1804. It was completed on the fifth day of the tenth month of the year, in front of the temple of Nishig-hakejo. The Japanese biography of Hokusai tells about this, from a story in drawings by Yenko-an, a friend of the painter.
In the middle of the north courtyard of the temple, protected by a fence, was spread a paper, specially made several times thicker than ordinary paper. On this piece of paper, Hokusai would paint a surface equivalent to that of 120 mats. Knowing that a Japanese mat measures 90 cm wide by 180 cm tall, this gave the artist a painting area 194 m long! To keep the paper stretched out, a very thick bed of rice straw was made, and at points, pieces of wood were set, serving as weights to keep the wind from lifting the paper. A scaffold was set up against the council chamber, facing the public. At the top of the scaffold, pulleys were attached to ropes in order to lift the immense drawing, fixed to a gigantic wood beam. Large brushes had been prepared, the smallest being the width of a broom. India ink was stored in enormous vats, to then be poured into a cask. These preparations occupied the entire morning, and from the first light of day, a crowd of nobles, yokels, women, old men, and children gathered in the temple courtyard to see the drawing produced.
In the afternoon, Hokusai and his students, in almost ceremonial garb, with bare legs and arms, got to work, students carrying ink in the cask, putting it into a bronze basin and accompanying the painter at work moving across the giant page. Hokusai first took a brush the width of a sheaf of hay. After dipping it in the ink, he drew the nose, and then the left eye of the Darma. He took several strides and drew the mouth and the ear. Then, he ran, tracing the outline of the head. That done, he completed the hair and the beard, taking, to shade them, another brush made strands of coconut that he dipped in a lighter India ink. At that moment, his students brought, on an immense platter, a brush made of rice sacks soaked in ink. To this brush was attached a rope. The brush was placed at a place indicated by Hokusai. He attached the rope around his neck and pulled the brush, with small steps, to make the thick lines of the Darma’s robe. When the lines were complete, he had to colour the robe red. Some students took that colour in buckets and spread it with shovels, while others mopped up the excess colour with wet towels. It was not until dusk that the Darma was completed. It was lifted up with the pulleys, but part of the paper stayed in the middle of the crowd, who, as in the Japanese expression, resembled an “army of ants around a piece of cake”. It was not until the next day that they were able to extend the scaffold sufficiently to lift the entire painting into the air.
This performance made Hokusai’s name burst out like a “thunder clap”."
Hokusai was also an excellent poet (haiku poetry) and writer, he published a lot of his own stories written and illustrated by him.
The most remarkable thing for me was that Hokusai was an amazing person himself: funny, artistic in every sense of the word, energetic, tongue-in-cheek. His personality is especially apparent through his letters.
For example, here a description of one Hokusai's letter. This is a simple letter about routine matters, but just look how Hokusai had written it, with all those little scetches, and humor, and lyricism, and irony, and overall easyness and flamboyancy: such an interesting and intelligent personality!
"This letter, written about New Year’s Day, has, as a header, a sketch in which the painter, in official garb, between two fir branches, is taking a deep bow. “There are several doors at which I must express my wishes for the New Year, so I will return another day, and goodbye, goodbye… But, until then, concerning the drawings to be engraved, please discuss the details with Yegawa. However, a bit later you will find a recommendation for the other woodcutters. Thank you for your frequent loans. I think that by the beginning of the second month of the year, I will have used up the paper, the colours, the brushes, and that I will be forced to go to Edo, in person, so I will visit you secretly and give you, orally, all the details that you may need. In this harsh season, above all during my travels, all things are very difficult, and among others, living in this severe cold with one lone robe, at the age of seventy-six. I ask you to think of the sad conditions in which I find myself, but my arm (here a sketch of his arm) has not weakened the least, and I work with determination. My only pleasure is becoming a good artist.” At the end of the letter, he represents himself in a microscopic sketch, humbly saluting between his hat and his drawing set on the ground."
I liked how Hokusai signed his letters and some works (albums of drawings, for example):
“Hokusai, crazy about drawing.”
“The old man crazy about drawing, at the age of eighty.”
“Old Hokusai, the crazy old artist, the beggar priest.”
“Hokusai, crazy about the moon.”
Isn't he cool?
One of the most interesting feature of his works is that Hokusai liked to draw series of pictures united by some common theme. These series are funny and diverse, and while every single picture from a series could not look very impressive, the whole row of pictures in one series represents so many different aspects of one subject and just looks perfect esthetically.
For example, the proverbial The Great Wave (its full name is Under a Great Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa): it is not an isolated drawing: it's actually one picture from the series “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (there were 36 pictures originally but later Hokusai added some more, so today we have 46 pictures in this series). Yes, yes, The Great Wave is just one of the views of Mount Fuji -- could you see Mount Fuji there? it is on the background, but our attention is on the sea, the wave, and the boat. The whole series consists of different pictures: some of them are dedicated to Mount Fuji as the only or the central figure of the image, but some show some scenes from routine life where Mount Fuji is only a distant (and sometimes hardly noticable) background, mostly as a little triangle on the horizon. You see different seasons, different times of year, different regions, different natural attractions, different people and moments of their life... the whole Japan! When you assess this idea as a whole, you feel amazement and inspiration.
Hokusai created a lot of various series, and I find them incredibly interesting as a phenomenon. The series could be quite simple and decorative (just nature, flowers, still-life pictures), they could be extremely beautiful and represent the world in all its brightness, they could be about people and their different activities, they could be very funny or scary, they could be deeply philosophical and illustrate some cultural or historical aspects and/or required a whole story for each of the picture. They are endlessly interesting and beautiful. It is very difficult to believe that one person could have such imagination and such talent to create all those hundreds of pictures.
OK, I think I made my point. The book is not very "readable," and it represents only a very small part of his pictures, but it is obvious from this small part that Hokusai is a giant! Now I want to visit a museum with a large collection of his works.
So, on Hokusai. The more I think about what I learned about Hokusai, the less words I can find, except for WOW.
Hokusai’s works were of staggering quantity and diversity. Illustrations of books (novels and poems), publications of his own illustrated stories, manga, isolated pictures, albums, surimonos (luxurious stamps, made on high quality paper, using exceptional pigments, often enhanced with gold and silver, embossing, and great delicacy in the engraving), series of plates, prints and panels, decorative fans, decks of cards, screens (японские ширмы), sketchbooks, kakemonos (traditional Japanese scrolles which are usually are hung on the wall vertically), makimonos (traditional Japanese scrolles up to 20 meters long which are for reading in the horizontal direction unscrolling gradually; they often include large panoramic pictures), shunga (erotic paintings) -- and so on, tons and volumes of them.
"Hokusai illustrated more than 120 works, one of which, the Suiko-Gaden, consisted of ninety volumes; he collaborated on about thirty volumes: yellow books and popular books at first; eastern and western promenades, glimpses of famous places, practical manuals for decorators and artisans, a life of Sakyamuni, a conquest of Korea, tales, legends, novels, biographies of heroes and heroines and the thirty-six women poets and one hundred poets, with songbooks and multiple albums of birds, plants, patrons of new fashion, books on education, morals, anecdotes, and fantastic and natural sketches.
Hokusai tried everything, and succeeded. He was tireless, multitalented, and brilliant."
He was not only talented but also highly professional: he could draw with any tools, in any scales, using any media (paints, ink, pencils, whatever). Imagine this performance of him:
"...a man was presented with a box divided into four compartments containing red, blue, black, and white sand. In throwing it on the floor as a farmer spreads seed, he drew and painted both flowers and birds, and in the end, amid noisy laughter, men and women."
The book also describes very spectacular events when Hokusai created huge paintings: images of such size that it is difficult even understand how he felt the scale and proportions so well, and drew an accurate and elegant but humongous picture without much preparation:
"In 1817, during one of Hokusai’s trips to Nagoya, the painter received an order for many book illustrations. Since his students vaunted the accuracy of representation of the beings and things in his drawings, particularly those in small formats, critics of ‘vulgar painting’ retorted that the little things produced by Hokusai’s brush were crafts and not art. These words hurt Hokusai and led him to say that, if a painter’s talent consisted in the size of the dimensions of his strokes and his works, he was ready to surprise his critics. This was when his student, Bokusen, and his friends came to help him execute, in public, a tremendous painting, a Darma of very different proportions than the one he painted in 1804. It was completed on the fifth day of the tenth month of the year, in front of the temple of Nishig-hakejo. The Japanese biography of Hokusai tells about this, from a story in drawings by Yenko-an, a friend of the painter.
In the middle of the north courtyard of the temple, protected by a fence, was spread a paper, specially made several times thicker than ordinary paper. On this piece of paper, Hokusai would paint a surface equivalent to that of 120 mats. Knowing that a Japanese mat measures 90 cm wide by 180 cm tall, this gave the artist a painting area 194 m long! To keep the paper stretched out, a very thick bed of rice straw was made, and at points, pieces of wood were set, serving as weights to keep the wind from lifting the paper. A scaffold was set up against the council chamber, facing the public. At the top of the scaffold, pulleys were attached to ropes in order to lift the immense drawing, fixed to a gigantic wood beam. Large brushes had been prepared, the smallest being the width of a broom. India ink was stored in enormous vats, to then be poured into a cask. These preparations occupied the entire morning, and from the first light of day, a crowd of nobles, yokels, women, old men, and children gathered in the temple courtyard to see the drawing produced.
In the afternoon, Hokusai and his students, in almost ceremonial garb, with bare legs and arms, got to work, students carrying ink in the cask, putting it into a bronze basin and accompanying the painter at work moving across the giant page. Hokusai first took a brush the width of a sheaf of hay. After dipping it in the ink, he drew the nose, and then the left eye of the Darma. He took several strides and drew the mouth and the ear. Then, he ran, tracing the outline of the head. That done, he completed the hair and the beard, taking, to shade them, another brush made strands of coconut that he dipped in a lighter India ink. At that moment, his students brought, on an immense platter, a brush made of rice sacks soaked in ink. To this brush was attached a rope. The brush was placed at a place indicated by Hokusai. He attached the rope around his neck and pulled the brush, with small steps, to make the thick lines of the Darma’s robe. When the lines were complete, he had to colour the robe red. Some students took that colour in buckets and spread it with shovels, while others mopped up the excess colour with wet towels. It was not until dusk that the Darma was completed. It was lifted up with the pulleys, but part of the paper stayed in the middle of the crowd, who, as in the Japanese expression, resembled an “army of ants around a piece of cake”. It was not until the next day that they were able to extend the scaffold sufficiently to lift the entire painting into the air.
This performance made Hokusai’s name burst out like a “thunder clap”."
Hokusai was also an excellent poet (haiku poetry) and writer, he published a lot of his own stories written and illustrated by him.
The most remarkable thing for me was that Hokusai was an amazing person himself: funny, artistic in every sense of the word, energetic, tongue-in-cheek. His personality is especially apparent through his letters.
For example, here a description of one Hokusai's letter. This is a simple letter about routine matters, but just look how Hokusai had written it, with all those little scetches, and humor, and lyricism, and irony, and overall easyness and flamboyancy: such an interesting and intelligent personality!
"This letter, written about New Year’s Day, has, as a header, a sketch in which the painter, in official garb, between two fir branches, is taking a deep bow. “There are several doors at which I must express my wishes for the New Year, so I will return another day, and goodbye, goodbye… But, until then, concerning the drawings to be engraved, please discuss the details with Yegawa. However, a bit later you will find a recommendation for the other woodcutters. Thank you for your frequent loans. I think that by the beginning of the second month of the year, I will have used up the paper, the colours, the brushes, and that I will be forced to go to Edo, in person, so I will visit you secretly and give you, orally, all the details that you may need. In this harsh season, above all during my travels, all things are very difficult, and among others, living in this severe cold with one lone robe, at the age of seventy-six. I ask you to think of the sad conditions in which I find myself, but my arm (here a sketch of his arm) has not weakened the least, and I work with determination. My only pleasure is becoming a good artist.” At the end of the letter, he represents himself in a microscopic sketch, humbly saluting between his hat and his drawing set on the ground."
I liked how Hokusai signed his letters and some works (albums of drawings, for example):
“Hokusai, crazy about drawing.”
“The old man crazy about drawing, at the age of eighty.”
“Old Hokusai, the crazy old artist, the beggar priest.”
“Hokusai, crazy about the moon.”
Isn't he cool?
One of the most interesting feature of his works is that Hokusai liked to draw series of pictures united by some common theme. These series are funny and diverse, and while every single picture from a series could not look very impressive, the whole row of pictures in one series represents so many different aspects of one subject and just looks perfect esthetically.
For example, the proverbial The Great Wave (its full name is Under a Great Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa): it is not an isolated drawing: it's actually one picture from the series “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (there were 36 pictures originally but later Hokusai added some more, so today we have 46 pictures in this series). Yes, yes, The Great Wave is just one of the views of Mount Fuji -- could you see Mount Fuji there? it is on the background, but our attention is on the sea, the wave, and the boat. The whole series consists of different pictures: some of them are dedicated to Mount Fuji as the only or the central figure of the image, but some show some scenes from routine life where Mount Fuji is only a distant (and sometimes hardly noticable) background, mostly as a little triangle on the horizon. You see different seasons, different times of year, different regions, different natural attractions, different people and moments of their life... the whole Japan! When you assess this idea as a whole, you feel amazement and inspiration.
Hokusai created a lot of various series, and I find them incredibly interesting as a phenomenon. The series could be quite simple and decorative (just nature, flowers, still-life pictures), they could be extremely beautiful and represent the world in all its brightness, they could be about people and their different activities, they could be very funny or scary, they could be deeply philosophical and illustrate some cultural or historical aspects and/or required a whole story for each of the picture. They are endlessly interesting and beautiful. It is very difficult to believe that one person could have such imagination and such talent to create all those hundreds of pictures.
OK, I think I made my point. The book is not very "readable," and it represents only a very small part of his pictures, but it is obvious from this small part that Hokusai is a giant! Now I want to visit a museum with a large collection of his works.
November 24, 2013
I've been wanting to read up on Japanese woodblock artists for quite some time so when I saw this book for a reasonable price, I jumped on it. This book is oversized and all the images are beautiful. There is a nice variety in subject matter in this book and I think it gives a good overview of Hokusai's work. This book does have a fair amount of text in addition to the pictures. The first part is a relatively brief overview of Hokusai's life and personality. The rest is a dry catalog of work. I found this section to be boring because the author is essentially briefly describing a ton of different art and most of it is not shown in the book. Also, some of the art that is mentioned is not necessarily near where it is mentioned in the text. Most people would buy this book for the images and not the text so it is relatively easy to ignore the dryness. Whether you like to draw yourself or just want to see some of Hokusai's masterful work, it is hard not feel crazy about drawing after looking through this one.
November 26, 2021
I wanted to read this after seeing the Hokudai movie (which was brilliant by the way). I was not expecting this to be tiny book it was... barely bigger than a can of tea... however the images in the book are a variety of his work (personally, I would have preferred more of his horror/yokai as I think they are beautiful). Sometimes the words got boring but really we are here for the art.
June 28, 2017
Very informative, but book read like a list. Each "intro" could have better served with a picture of the painting/artwork being described. Perhaps it is because I read it in eformat, whereby the included pictures don't really match up with the paragraphs.
March 20, 2021
I used this mostly as a picture book, I've been intrigued by these Japanese wood blocking artists for some time. This is a coffee table sized book which allowed for easy viewing of the prints. I did read some of the information about Hokusai's life to put things in perspective.
November 29, 2021
Beautiful book.
The more I learn about Hokusai, the more I’m amazed at his life and talent. 🌊
The more I learn about Hokusai, the more I’m amazed at his life and talent. 🌊
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews