In 2020 the British Museum acquired a group of 103 drawings by the Japanese artist Katsushika
Hokusai and today I'm very pleased to be taking you on a special highlights tour of our latest
exhibition all about the drawings sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun, ‘Hokusai The Great
Picture Book of Everything’. Hello my name is Alfred Haft, I'm the curator of the exhibition
‘Hokusai The Great Picture Book of Everything’ and It’s a thrill working with Hokusai's
wonderful illustrations in such depth. It is a rather unusual show for a museum. It's
as though you have a book laid out in front of you waiting for you to peruse. A book that
sadly for Hokusai was never published but thankfully for us has preserved an incredibly
rare set of illustrations from the hand of Hokusai himself. Produced during the 1820s
to 40s for a woodblock printed picture encyclopaedia the 103 drawings should have been destroyed
during the printing process. They are very rare and only survive because the book was
never published. In this period the Edo period all publications were done by woodblock in
which process a drawing is pasted face down onto a piece of wood and the block cutter
takes his chisel and cuts right through the paper removing all of the areas between the
lines in a drawing. But of course that means that the drawing is destroyed in the process
and that means that every print that you see, every book that you see, produced in Japan
during the Edo period all of the artists drawings in every case have been lost and that is simply
the sacrifice that was made. Hokusai's books were sold in urban bookstores and reached
the provinces through traveling libraries. Aspiring painters across the country studied
his art materials. His warrior tales appealed to anyone interested in adventure including
adults and his poetry books addressed an educated readership. Picture encyclopaedias such as
The Great Picture Book were used to teach children, in these exceptional drawings recently
acquired by the British Museum, Hokusai reinvents the dry matter of fact east Asian picture
encyclopaedia with humour and a sense of adventure. Hokusai lived towards the end of the Edo period
which went from 1615 to 1868, during which the Shogun's military government banned foreign
travel. Encyclopaedias such as The Great Picture Book of Everything introduced Japanese people
to the far away places they could not visit. Two letters from Hokusai to his publisher
Suzanbō indicate that the artist was still working on The Great Picture Book into his
final years when he was living in Edo modern Tokyo with his artist daughter Ōi. Hokusai's
drawings cover three main topics: the natural world, Buddhist India, and where we're going
next is to ancient China.
So the first part of the exhibition is about China and the world beyond China, and it has
two parts which I think of as myth and history. Commercial trade connected China and Japan
during the Edo period but China was also a source of ancient lore and tradition. In Hokusai's
day the prevailing ethical system was Confucianism. In keeping with that system the drawings include
illustrations of loyal advisors or men of principle such as Yun Zhongzi who tries to
warn King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty that his mysterious concubine is actually a thousand-year-old
evil fox spirit in disguise. Here with his assistant Leizhen, Yun uses a magic mirror
to reveal the fox's true appearance. Once you've seen this drawing here keep an eye
out for the story because it appears twice more in the exhibition, once in a print and
once in another drawing in the India section. This drawing depicts Xi Wangmu who is known
as the Queen Mother of the West. Xi Wangmu rides a royal carriage accompanied by female
attendants on Mt. Kunlun. She is the goddess of prosperity and longevity worshipped widely
in East Asia. So there are several reasons for having selected this drawing to highlight,
one is simply that it is a favourite among the Japanese curators at the museum. Another
is that it is beautifully detailed and atmospheric because as you can see the dots disperse as
they rise up the drawing and you get a sense of light filtering through the mist, a sense
of sparkling mist which is very appropriate for an immortal living on an imaginary mountain.
So here are a group of six drawings which depict the beginnings of human civilization.
They cover such subjects as music, weights and measures, the origins of medicine, the
origins of alcohol which would have been rice wine at the time, the origins of using fire
to cook, and the origins of publishing and the making of paper and the making of ink.
All of these aspects of human civilization that we perhaps take for granted are designated
as inventions as divine gifts. What I would like to mention is that these drawings the
103 drawings arrived at the museum in no particular order, and part of the puzzle has been to
figure out how to organize them. So now let's take a look at some of the drawings in the India section.
Unlike China with which Japan had direct connections, the interest in India
here is a by-product of the interest in Buddhism. India was a foreign land which was the source
of Buddhism and a place that no Japanese of the time could have visited. So these drawings
are all about the stories that are found in the Buddhist texts the Sutras. We do not know
how Hokusai studied Buddhism in ancient India but he is known to have chanted the Lotus
Sutra and to have kept a Buddhist shrine at home.
Avalokiteśvara, or Kannon In Japanese, the Buddhist deity of compassion is believed to have 33 different forms.
Here as Dragon Head Avalokiteśvara, the deity appears seated on the head of a flying dragon.
In his drawing Hokusai has combined two types of brushwork: formal lines to depict the deity
and more informal brush marks for the dragon and atmospheric clouds. So Hokusai's interest
in the sort of expressive qualities of different kinds of brush work applies in several cases
in the drawings. So for example in a drawing which depicts the grand architect and originator
of sculpture in India the Hindu god Visvakarman who has carved a sculpture of the Buddha.
But what is interesting is the difference in the way Hokusai has depicted the sculpture
versus the figures. The figures are drawn with lines and the sculpture is depicted with
what are called nail head brush strokes. Hokusai has used brush strokes that are usually used
for landscape to depict a roughly cut wooden figure so in this way we can see how Hokusai
uses different kinds of brush strokes for different kinds of expressive purposes. In
this drawing we see Maudgalyāyana subduing a wild beast similar to a giant ox. He will
use the beast's skin to make a drum. This story may relate to a Buddhist folktale about
an ox that sacrificed its own skin so that the Buddha could make a drum to scare off
a tiger. The disciple’s bent profile mirrors the silhouette of the tamed creature and with
that drawing in mind and with oxes in mind let's move on to the drawings of the natural world.
Hokusai's drawings of the natural world come closest to the example of earlier encyclopaedias
but his animals and birds engage the viewer with a distinctive penetrating gaze. The British
Museum's drawings for The Great Picture Book cover mythical beasts, land animals, and birds,
with only four illustrations of plants and minerals. In this expertly detailed drawing
Hokusai pairs a soaring bird-of-paradise at the top with the mythical Chinese jianjian
at the bottom, a conjoined husband and wife bird with shared wings. The deft brush strokes
suggest the airiness of the bird's feathers as well as their otherworldly freedom and grace.
This bold dynamic work seems an apt expression of Hokusai's own unfettered imagination.
Skilfully compressed into a small frame, the composition would retain its integrity on
almost any scale. Here in the undergrowth near human habitation a weasel sinks its teeth
into a rat beside a flowering begonia. The discarded roof tile with a triple comma design
may place this animated scene in the vicinity of an official's residence or perhaps a temple,
and it has something of the suggestion of nature red in tooth and claw. We may notice
Hokusai here has taken a piece of paper and pasted it over a section of drawing that he
didn't think was quite right. The drawing itself didn't have to look absolutely beautiful
because it isn't in itself a finished work, it was meant as a tool to be pasted onto the
woodblock. I'd like also to just mention a drawing that
I personally like which is the bear under the waterfall, a drawing that I've already
discussed in a Curator's Corner but comments on that video have taught me that the bear
turns out to be an Asian bear which is identifiable by the white mark on its front. But what I
love about the bear is its patience and its sense of being perfectly contented in this
pouring waterfall. So as you look at this drawing you may notice the claw-like character
of the wave crests and that brings me to the last section of this tour which is a discussion
of the Great Wave.
So this is the last section of the tour in which we learn a little bit about the differences
between earlier and later impressions of the Great Wave. The Great Wave may be familiar
to you, it is one of Hokusai's most famous designs and probably the most famous work
of Japanese art in the world. It depicts three fishing boats that are battling a giant storm
wave which is bearing down on them. The beauty of the print is the figure of Mt. Fuji still
and in the distance as a kind of anchor to the chaos of the scene. It comes from a series
called The 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, which has made Hokusai almost a household name. In this
section of the exhibition we get to learn about the work of my colleague Capucine Korenberg
who is a scientist at the British Museum who has been diligently looking for every known
copy of the Great Wave in museums and public collections around the world and she's turned
up 111 of them and tracked how they differ from one another, but she is the best person
to explain how that all works. My name is Capucine Korenberg, and I'm a scientist at
the British Museum. I spent about 50 hours just looking at Hokusai's Great Wave, this
is about the same amount of time you would spend brushing your teeth over two years.
So It’s not just one impression of the Great Wave as many people think there were originally
thousands of them. Experts think that at least 8000 prints of the Great Wave were pulled
from the woodblocks and sold and possibly prints were made until the woodblocks just
started to be so worn out that they couldn't be used anymore and prints are not numbered
or dated so if you want to know if a print comes from an early edition or from a late
edition you have to look into detail at them. The British Museum is actually lucky enough
to have three prints of the Great Wave. I've decided to show you this one because it shows
the most sign of woodblock wear so It’s not the most pristine one because we've got
one that shows very little sign of woodblock wear but here you can see what I'm talking
about. The colour woodblocks were made actually in a less durable wood so sometimes they
had to be replaced. The light blue woodblock at some point got lost or they decided it
was too damaged to be used and they recut… someone recut it but the shape of this new
wood block was completely different from the original one and and nobody understands why
this is the case, why didn't they try to make something quite faithful to the original design?
What I'm really interested in is to try to find out what the print looked like when it
was pristine when it had not been faded at all by light. Other things that are quite interesting
is also the paper in which the print was printed. All the scientific analysis we do
on objects they have to be non-destructive so we have to be quite resourceful. So what
we think we're allowed with is to take just a fibre so we want to identify colourant just
by analyzing a tiny tiny quantity of it. This is micro destructive so it’s a very small
element very small amount of material and it could tell us a lot about it.
Thank you very much for staying through this tour. Hokusai is we believe one of Japan's
greatest artists we hope that this exhibition will show you his great imagination, his great
skill, his technical abilities and his invention in composition and subject matter and will
inspire you to if not see the exhibition perhaps to study more of Hokusai perhaps look at more
Japanese art and if possible to visit the galleries here at the British Museum where
we have a fantastic collection of Japanese art. There is also a wonderful book by Timothy
Clark called ‘Hokusai The Great Picture Book of Everything’ which includes every
single one of the drawings and gives much more historical background and detail on the
drawings themselves and also the research that has gone into them. That is the first
time that this set of drawings has ever been published and hopefully would have been of
appeal to Hokusai as well.