Katsushika Hokusai / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

(Credit: Katsushika Hokusai / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Hokusai and the wave that swept the world

Jason Farago
9 April 2015

Without the Japanese printmaker Hokusai, Impressionism might never have happened. Jason Farago examines the moment when European art started turning Japanese.

In the beginning was the wave. The blue and white tsunami, ascending from the left of the composition like a massive claw, descends pitilessly on Mount Fuji – the most august mountain in Japan, turned in Katsushika Hokusai’s vision into a small and vulnerable hillock. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830–31, yet it forms part of a complex global network of art, commerce, and politics. Its intense blue comes from Hokusai’s pioneering use of Prussian Blue ink – a foreign pigment, imported, probably via China, from England or Germany. The wave, from the beginning, stretched beyond Japan. Soon, it would crash over Europe.

The studios of Picasso,Monet and Koons / Calm, chaos, canvas

In the Sculptor’s Studio, Paris (January 1911)As well as pioneering aerial photography,
Léon Gimpel, author of this photograph, was the first to have his work published
in colour, in 1907

Photograph: Léon Gimpel/Collection Société Française de Photographie, Paris/Léon Gimpel

Calm, chaos, canvas: the studios of Picasso, Monet and Koons – in pictures

Pablo Picasso at work (1955)

Picasso worked in seven different studios through his life – he casts a solitary figure in front of his easel here.• In the Studio: The Artist Photographed from Ingres to Jeff Koons is at Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, until 17 July 2016

Photograph: André Villers, Adagp, Paris 2016/Succession Picasso

Francis Bacon’s studio (1986)

Bacon’s workpace feels as fractious and disturbed as his paintings

Photograph: Charles Matton, Adagp, Paris 2016