Creators (15 page)

Along with his astonishing creative virtues, Turner had one appalling weakness: he could not draw, or paint, the human form. His staffage is always feeble, sometimes embarrassingly so. It is true that Turner shared this incapacity with his great hero Claude. But the latter was painfully aware of his defect and did everything in his power to correct it—though to no avail. Turner was not conscious of how bad his figures were; at any rate, he said nothing on the subject and certainly took no steps to put things right by attending life classes (as a younger contemporary, Edward Lear, did, saying his figures were not good enough, though they were a world above Turner’s). It is odd that Turner did not seek to acquire the astonishing skill of Canaletto (whom he admired and in some respects learned from), a master of townscape who devised a remarkably quick and successful—if a little formulaic, not to say mechanical—method of doing the figures with which his canvases teem. Despite his debility, Turner put in bad staffage when it was not really necessary to have any. When he made a figure prominent—for instance, in his study of Bonaparte on a lonely beach with a howling dog—the result is disastrous.

W
HEN WE SWITCH FROM
T
URNER
to his older contemporary Hokusai Katsushika (1760–1849), who was born a generation earlier but survived to within a year or two of Turner’s death, we find an instructive comparison and contrast. The two men were creativity personified, in quantity, quality, and every other respect. Turner transformed landscape, during his lifetime, into the greatest of all visual arts, and left the world of painting permanently changed—indeed, artists all over the world are still learning from him (if they have the sense and sensitivity). Hokusai, in effect, created Japanese landscape painting from nothing, but he also portrayed Japanese life in the first half of the nineteenth century with dazzling graphic skill and an encyclopedic completeness that have never been equaled anywhere, throwing in Japan’s flora and fauna for good measure. Both men were born into artisanal poverty (Hokusai was the adopted son of a mirror maker). Neither had artistic forebears. Each learned to draw at the earliest possible age, about three, and contrived to do so incessantly, throughout a long, industrious life. Neither did anything else or wished to do anything else.

Both men were born in a capital city and were streetwise. But Turner’s London was the wealthiest city in the world, and he succeeded there early, becoming and remaining rich. By contrast, Hokusai’s Tokyo (then called Edo) was a huddled collection of villages just entering a period of intermediate technology. When Hokusai was five, the first large group of colored prints was published there, and it soon became possible for gifted, hardworking draftsmen to earn a living in the nascent publishing industry. Like Dürer, Hokusai began with woodblocks, but unlike Dürer he did not come from the wealthy bourgeoisie; he had no useful connections, no well-endowed wife. He worked fanatically hard all his life and made only a bare living. Whatever he did manage to save went to pay the gambling debts of a reckless son and a still worse grandson. During the “Tenpo crisis” of 1836–1838 (when Edo emptied as a result of plague and agricultural depression), he was reduced to hawking his wares in the street. There was a restless rootlessness to him, reflected in the fact that he
changed his name, or rather the signature on his works, more than fifty times, more often than any other Japanese artist; and in the fact that during his life he lived at ninety-three different addresses.
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The names he used included Fusenko, meaning “he who does only one thing without being influenced by others”; “The Crazy Old Man of Katsushika”; and “Manji, the Old Man Mad about Drawing.” After he fell into a ditch, as a result of a loud clap of thunder, he signed himself “Thunder” for a time.

Like Dürer, whom he resembled in many ways, he was a combination of proper pride in his skills and modesty, fired by the determination to improve himself and do better. This comes out strongly in a letter to his publisher, accompanying a self-portrait at age eighty-three, with a curious snatch of autobiography:

Hokusai’s curriculum vitae, so far as we know it, tells a somewhat different story.
²⁸
When Hokusai, having learned woodcutting, began regular employment in the studio of Katsukawa, Shunshō, prints of actors (in which his master specialized) and courtesans, known as “beauties,” were almost the only salable images. They dominated Hokusai’s early work, and he became adept at them. But technology was changing and taste expanding. Western prints were creeping in, carried by Dutch traders. In 1783 the first copperplate etchings were made in Japan. From his earliest years as a trained printmaker, Hokusai strove to expand the subject matter of Japanese art. As he put it later, he “studied all schools.” But as art rose to its feet, the state, dominated by the authoritarian shogunate, put on the shackles. In 1791 censorship seals became obligatory on all prints, and state interference
intensified throughout Hokusai’s lifetime until, in 1842, a full system of control was imposed and many types of prints (including “actors,” alleged to be satirical and subversive) were banned.

Print censorship was inextricably involved with government supervision of books, and illustrations for books formed Hokusai’s main output throughout his life. He did the pictures and decorations in 267 books (some multivolume), plus five published posthumously.
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Hokusai liked this work, particularly when he was in complete charge, but he was always keen on new experiences and pushing the frontiers. In 1804 he engaged publicly in what we would now call “performance art.” Before a crowd of gawking citizens, he strode over 350 square meters of paper, painting with a bamboo broom dipped in a pail of ink. The result was erected, upright, in a bamboo frame and revealed to be a gigantic image of Daruma, patriarch of Zen Buddhism. The exploit won Hokusai the title
kigin
, “eccentric artist.” Hokusai, like Turner, was not averse to being thought eccentric: it gave him greater freedom of action. Indeed, like Salvator Rosa before him, and Whistler, Dalí, and Warhol after him, he deliberately courted publicity and thrived on it. It enabled him to push forward into new territory.

In England, cheap published books of travel inspired by a search for the “picturesque,” and illustrated with prints which could be hand-colored, had become a leading form of literature since the 1760s, providing well-paid work for writers and artists alike. As we have noted, Turner benefited from this long-sustained fashion, especially when it spread to European subject matter. Illustrated topographical books began to appear in France, then in Germany. The fashion infected Japan, too. Shortly after 1800 the first landscapes were integrated into illustrations for popular novels. Hokusai seized eagerly on this development. Indeed, he gradually created the language of the Japanese landscape, partly following or adapting western models, partly inventing the visual vocabulary himself. Up to his day, Japanese artists had never drawn clouds, only mists. Hokusai brought in cloud formations, following western patterns, and combined clouds and mists. He also learned from western prints how to convey perspective in depth, how to capitalize on shading, and how to draw shadows.
He also used western products, such as Prussian blue paint, which came as a godsend to him. He exercised extraordinary skill in adapting, rather than copying, western methods, and effected a synthesis of east and west that made his work attractive both to Europeans and to Americans, as well as to Japanese.
³⁰

Hokusai’s efforts to create a Japanese taste for landscape began to take effect early in the 1830s when his
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
(actually forty-eight prints) was published to great success. These were the first large-scale landscapes in the history of Japanese prints. He followed them with
Going the Rounds of the Waterfalls in All Provinces
(1832), which was an original idea of his own, since his method of drawing waterfalls owed nothing to the west.
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These topographic works were followed by
Large Flowers
, then
Small Flowers
, and then more topography:
Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands
(1832) and
Remarkable Views of the Bridges of All Provinces
(1834). Hokusai had a lifelong passion for bridges and drew them with wonderful skill and from a stunning variety of angles. In 1835 came
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
. Hokusai also invented seascapes, and in 1833 produced
One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean
. His
Giant Wave
, which he produced in a variety of forms, became his most famous image, indeed one of the most famous in all art, alongside Dürer’s
Rhinoceros
, Rembrandt’s
Elephant
, and
The Scream
by Edvard Munch. It, too, was an amalgam of western and Japanese pictorial idioms.
³²
Hokusai was also producing illustrated books of poems, and many of his works have poetic images, for instance the beautiful
Snow, Moon, and Flowers
of 1833. Like Turner, Hokusai saw landscape in terms of poetry, both classical and modern.

While these works were appearing, Hokusai was also engaged in a formidable undertaking: teaching ordinary middle-class or lower-middle-class Japanese to draw. His instructional drawings, of which fifteen volumes eventually appeared, are known as
Manga
, “random sketches.” Volume 1 was printed in 1812, when Hokusai was fifty-two, and seems to have been put together from his sketches by his pupils, of whom we know the names of fifteen.
³³
It averaged ten images per page, woodcuts printed in light and dark, shades of ink with pale rose tints. It concentrated on the human figure, was cheaply priced, and proved remarkably popular. So Hokusai, and
his assistants, worked hard on the series. Volumes 2 and 3 appeared in 1815; 4 and 5 in 1816; 6, 7, 8, and 9 in 1817; and 10 in 1819. Thereafter the pace slackened: Volumes 11 and 12 had to wait till 1834; Volume 13 came posthumously the year after Hokusai died; and 14 (1875) and 15 (1878) were probably not mainly or at all by Hokusai.
³⁴

The volumes contain not only human figures but animals, birds, insects, flowers, fish, landscapes, water views, ships, and rafts. Volume 5 is mainly concerned with shrine architecture, 6 with
kendo
(fighting with poles); and 7 with landscape, reflecting Hokusai’s expanding interest in that subject. Volume 8 ranges from animals to looms and mountebanks, and includes the famous drawing
Blind Men Examining an Elephant
. Volume 10 is mainly devoted to ghost stories—it was one of Hokusai’s obiter dicta that “ghosts are easy to draw, humans and animals hard.” Volume 11 is on rivers. The
Manga
constitute one of the largest artistic compilations ever produced—well over 40,000 images in all, embracing a vast variety of subjects. It is not surprising that they proved even more popular in Japan than Hokusai’s other works, and equally popular among Europeans when the volumes reached Paris during the Second Empire and were published by the Goncourts. (There is a good modern anthology, with excellent text and translations of all the prefaces.)
³⁵

The range of the subject matter is unique in art. There is a great deal about craftsmen.
³⁶
Many studies of drunks make their appearance. There is a startling drawing of a man attacked by an octopus, and another of men carrying a sorceress across a stream. Much of the instruction is still useful today: for instance, how to draw waterfowl, irises (a favorite flower of Hokusai’s, and of mine, and fiendishly difficult to get right in line and color), oxen, and horses—the last two using straight lines and circles. Japan was a largely vegetarian country then, and Hokusai’s universe shows few cows, sheep, or pigs. But he enjoyed drawing horses, especially with fierce warriors riding them; these horses did not pull carts—that was the work of oxen. Hokusai also loved drawing woodsmen. One of the best things he ever did (not in the
Manga
) is a watercolor of an exhausted woodcutter, resting his head on a fagot, another at his back, his ax lying poetically by his
side—a glorious drawing, beautifully colored, as moving as Rembrandt’s
Saskia Asleep
. The drawing of the woodcutter once belonged to Edmond de Goncourt. Of course, one has to distinguish between
Manga
drawings produced rapidly for instruction, and drawings done individually for Hokusai’s own delight or for a collector. The
Manga
contain some notable drawings of rain, a specialty of Hokusai’s—rain is the curse of Japan, as of England—and people, especially women with elaborate hairdos, coping with sudden showers. Hokusai drew showers and rainstorms more often than any other artist, in Japan or anywhere else.

Hokusai drew for the market. He catered to public taste and appetites. One type of print was
shunga
, erotica, which Hokusai produced throughout his working life, into his mid-sixties, though never thereafter. It varied greatly in quality. His best book of
shunga
is
Nami Chiduri
, chiefly remarkable for sensitivity in depicting limb positions, skin texture, garment folds, and gestures.
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There is a theory that his best erotica was actually drawn by his favorite, gifted daughter, Oei, but no direct evidence has been produced.
Shungi
does not show Hokusai at his best. The genital organs, both male and female, are too large, though in other respects realistic. The postures are unconvincing, and the leg positions are often impossible, though cosmeticized by garments. Other Japanese artists also created
shunga
, though even less successfully than Hokusai. Western artists from Rowlandson and Fuseli to Turner himself tried their hand. Turner’s erotic works are hopeless, painfully unstimulating and distressingly amateurish. By comparison, Hokusai’s writhing couples—as always when we compare his figures with Turner’s—are highly professional. But it is a fact that the only erotic print of Hokusai’s which sticks in the mind is his notorious study of a woman pearl fisher being pleasured by two octopuses: a small one at her head and a large one at her genitals. It has undoubted imaginative power, and the master clearly relished creating it.
³⁸
But in general he was ashamed of his
shunga
. He never signed one with any of his names.