“I was open-mouthed when I saw them, my heart was palpitating,” says Tim Clark, former head of the Japanese section at the British Museum. “It was like meeting an old friend who you hadn’t seen for a long time.”
Spread out in front of Clark in an office just off the museum’s Japanese galleries, back in October 2019, were 103 drawings which he believed — instantly believed, as soon as he saw them — were by Hokusai, the 19th-century Japanese painter and printmaker best known for “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, with its deep blue swell and creamy foam-like grasping hands. It was Clark who urged the museum to buy them.
As I sat in front of the drawings, those fragile postcard-sized slips, in that same room this past August, I understood why Clark’s heart had raced — because mine did too.
Guiding me through them, before they were put in temporary mounts and framed for an exhibition from September 30, was Alfred Haft, a curator in the museum’s Japanese section, who had arranged some of the drawings in three piles. Each pile reflected a theme from the set: scenes from the origins of Buddhism in India; from the early development of human civilisation in China; and from the natural world — animals, birds, sea creatures and more. All the drawings have kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) to describe, more or less clearly, their contents.
Each one offers its own kind of magic. A beatific Buddhist deity of compassion, drawn in fine lines, sits atop a flying dragon whose rough-scaled tail curls around to frame the picture; the dragon’s eyes, half goofy, half piercing, watch you. A burst of lightning flings an impious king into the air, its bolts enfolding and penetrating him. Sitting on a rock underneath a cascading waterfall, a canny bear waits for prey. And, in a story Haft feelingly tells, a Daoist climbs up a cloud to grab the moon, so he can take it back to people who thought they were too unimportant to visit a divine palace.
The drawings transfix with their fluency, immediacy and rich characterisation. But there are layers of mystery around them too, as a collection and as individual artworks — even where they come from and why they were made.
Clark and his scholarly colleagues have spent the past two years attempting to answer some of these questions. Tracing the artworks’ story backwards, the British Museum acquired them for £270,000 from dealer Israel Goldman, who had seen them at auction in Paris in 2019, where they had been ascribed to one of Hokusai’s pupils, Katsushika Isai — mistakenly, Clark believes. They had not otherwise been seen on the open market since 1948, when the collection of jeweller Henri Vever was sold. But then we come to a halt: precisely how they arrived in Vever’s possession is unknown.
A bigger question is why Hokusai (1760-1849) made them in the first place. One clue is in the collection’s name, inked on the light paulownia-wood box they arrived in and referred to in a couple of the artist’s letters: The Great Picture Book of Everything.
A popular strand of Japanese publishing since the late 17th century had been the picture encyclopedia, often with rather businesslike illustrations, says Clark. But while they had always embraced all kinds of animals, such as the characterful ducks on the table in front of me, they had never stretched to Indian religion and Chinese origin stories. Clark’s current thinking is that by the 1840s, when Hokusai was in his eighties, he was radically reimagining the picture encyclopedia, taking it to places it had never been — indeed places that Hokusai, like all other Japanese people in the tightly policed Edo period (1603-1867), had never been either. Citizens were banned from leaving the country, most foreigners from coming in — a three-century-long lockdown.
If the “leading book illustrator of his generation, if not the whole of the Edo period”, in Clark’s words, was producing a conceptually renewed picture encyclopedia, why did it never come out? Clark ventures that Hokusai was simply “too busy. He’s trying to say yes to as many competing commissions from publishers.”
Edo’s loss was our gain. Consider how prints were made: a block-cutter glued a drawing to a piece of wood and carved away, recreating the image’s texture and detail, before the block was inked and printed. The very process of making prints destroyed the drawing, which means almost nothing exists in Hokusai’s hand. No wonder Clark’s heart raced: 103 unlikely survivals from the brush of Japan’s most renowned artist had landed in his lap.
Then there is the issue of interpretation, decoding the figures and scenes we see. The animals present themselves most readily — there is no mistaking one of Hokusai’s tigers — but there is more to it than that, says Haft: this encyclopedia “covers the known world — but that doesn’t mean the visible world”. In Hokusai’s bestiary are creatures “we might consider ‘imaginary’” but which were real enough, even if in legend, to Hokusai’s contemporaries. Including these dragons, these two-headed birds, “reflects a mindset of what is possible. It shows a little more freedom of imagination than we may have today.”
The Indian and Chinese scenes from deep history can be tougher to puzzle out, even with the annotations. “The richness of [Hokusai’s] constantly expanding world”, drawn from his thirsty engagement with the texts and images of others, means they are not always easy to pin down. Why are a Confucian scholar and his acolytes taking shelter in a gigantic egg in one drawing here? It’s a good question.
The biggest question, however, does not relate to history or interpretation, but rather to how Hokusai wants us to engage with these drawings. The first time I looked at many of them, it took me a few seconds to work out what was going on — not which form of Buddha or which feline he has painted, but even where the figures begin and end. In one, the robes of four disciples of Buddha melt into each other. There is a visual confusion — not because of Hokusai’s lack of skill but because he wants his drawings to have a much more intense purpose.
There is a concept in Buddhism called the koan, a paradox or riddle which shows how useless logic is, thus provoking enlightenment. Hokusai’s drawings work in the same way: by making it hard at first glance even to properly register what we’re seeing, we have a moment of confusion, of doubt, and must push ourselves deeper into the picture to understand it and our own way of thinking. These drawings are visual koan. By confounding us, Hokusai enlightens us.
This process is profound, but it does not undermine Hokusai’s democratising impulse to spread knowledge. One of his “fundamental ethoses”, says Clark, “is to share, and there’s this wonderful phrase which is part of the title of some of his books . . . If you read the characters literally, it’s ‘receiving from the gods and sharing with open hands’.” What Hokusai is eager to share with us, I realised as I sat in the British Museum that morning, six inches from those brush-touched sheets, is not just his knowledge of the birds and the Buddhas, but the experience of losing and finding ourselves in his art.
From September 30, britishmuseum.org
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