When Katsushika Hokusai published his series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" between 1830 and 1833, he was 70 years old and signed it with a declared pseudonym: "the old man mad about drawing." The thirty-third print, titled "Under the Wave off Kanagawa," would become the most reproduced Japanese artwork in the world. Thirty-six woodblock prints sold for a few coins in Edo, in 1833. Today, a period impression trades at around 100,000 dollars.
Edo, World Graphic Capital (1603-1868)
During the Edo period, Japan lived in self-imposed isolation. The Tokugawa shogunate banned contact with foreigners from 1633. Urban culture flourished. A merchant class emerged in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Osaka - wealthy, literate, hungry for entertainment. The woodblock print, called ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"), became its graphic medium.
The technical process deserves a pause. The artist draws in ink. An engraver transfers the drawing onto hard cherry-wood blocks: one block per colour, meaning ten to fifteen blocks per print for a careful work. The printer applies ink with a brush, places the paper, rubs with a baren (a disc of braided bamboo leaves). Each impression is a manual registration, perfect. Hokusai's series was printed in several thousand copies.
Hiroshige (1797-1858) followed. His series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido," published in 1833, is the visual equivalent of a travel guide. Each print shows a station between Edo and Kyoto: a bridge, an inn, a pass, a rain shower. Utamaro, earlier, had specialised his workshop in portraits of courtesans: tight compositions, the face occupying two-thirds of the print.
Japan's Opening and the European Shock
1854. Commodore Perry forced, by gunboat, the opening of Japanese ports to Western trade. Over the following twenty years, tens of thousands of prints arrived in Europe, often as packing paper for porcelain. It was Parisian merchants such as Siegfried Bing who noticed them.
The effect on European painting was immediate. Van Gogh copied three Hiroshige prints in 1887. Toulouse-Lautrec invented the modern poster drawing directly on ukiyo-e composition: flat areas of vivid colour, thick black outlines, flattened perspective. James Whistler signed his paintings with a Japanese butterfly. Art Nouveau, which dominated Paris in 1900, is largely a child of Japonisme.
Yayoi Kusama left for New York at 28, with a suitcase of drawings and without speaking English. Her parents had ordered her to come home and get married.
The 20th Century, and Yayoi Kusama
Foujita arrived in Paris in 1913. He settled in Montparnasse, becoming a regular of Modigliani and Soutine. His fine line, inherited from Japanese drawing, gives the women he painted a recognisable strangeness. After the war, Japanese graphic art industrialised (manga, Toho film posters, Sori Yanagi's design).
Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929 in Matsumoto, left for New York in 1957. She spent the 1960s organising happenings, painting her first "Infinity Nets," surviving in difficult studios. She returned to Japan in 1973, voluntarily moving into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she still lives today at 96. She continues to work every day. Her dots, obsessive motifs she has painted since the 1950s, have become a worldwide visual signature.
A Kusama poster, such as "Eyes" from 1998 that we reproduce, combines all this heritage: the frontal composition of the ukiyo-e print, Japanese pop of the 1970s, the artist's formal obsession with repeated patterns. Seeing it reproduced on 275 g/m² fine-art paper restores some of the materiality that mass editions have stripped away.
