Dallas Asian

Motion Pictures: A Handful of Drawings by Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), a Japanese painter, book illustrator, and designer of woodblock prints in Edo (modern Tokyo), excelled in depicting motion. He is best known for his iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series of color woodblock prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1820. The great wave roils toward circularity, enclosing the fishermen within chambers of its self-repeating forms. Small C-shaped fingers of water are thrown forward of the great curve as it arcs to its thunderous completion. Few pictures so successfully depict the fluid dynamics of the ocean or induce such terror among the unseaworthy. Great Wave off Kanagawa inspired the botanical design in Snuff Bottle Court at the Crow Collection.



Hokusai also made thousands of studies of human figures in motion, some collected by his students and published among other drawings as manga, or “whimsical pictures.” This small display of drawings of the human figure provides a hint of Hokusai’s ability to suggest not simply movement caught in a frame but movement that continues in time. How does he do it? Visit the exhibition and explore this question in drawings of mounted warriors, dancing misfits, and scribbling courtesans. Hokusai wished for a lifetime of one hundred years so that he might achieve some understanding of making pictures, and he dedicated himself to the task from the age of six to his death at eighty-nine.