Art: Every Line Will Be Alive

At 80, he was found one day weeping at his workbench because he thought that he had not learned enough about the art of drawing. On his deathbed nine years later, he cried out in anguish, “If heaven would only grant me ten more years, or only five, I might still become a great artist.” Katsushika Hokusai need not have so tormented himself: by the time he died in 1849, ne was one of the finest—and certainly the most appealing—painters Japan ever produced. Proof of his talent could be seen last week at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery, which this summer decided to honor—with a rare exhibit of Hokusai paintings and drawings—both the 200th anniversary of Hokusai’s birth and the loo th anniversary of the treaty that opened Japan to the West.

Born in the old capital of Edo, where Tokyo stands today, Hokusai was brought up by a maker of mirrors from whom he learned the rudiments of design. But before he settled down to being an artist himself, he took on every kind of work from running errands to selling red peppers to writing cheap novels. Fortunately, he was a born showman and soon began to attract attention. Once he painted a portrait so large that a horse could have walked through the mouth of the subject. He also painted a couple of sparrows so small that they could be seen only through a magnifying glass. On another occasion, he astounded the Shogun lenari by doing a kind of pioneer action painting. He dipped a rooster’s feet in some paint, let it wander across a wide piece of paper, triumphantly labeled the result: Maple Leaves Floating on the Tatsuta River.

93 Homes, 50 Names. If no brush was available, he would paint with his fingers —or with an egg, a bottle or a cucumber. During the famine of 1836 he kept himself in food by inviting his more fortunate neighbors in to cover pieces of paper with lines and splotches which he would quickly link together into a design and then sign. The price of such do-it-yourself art was whatever rice the neighbor could spare. Hokusai’s fame spread, but he was never far from disaster.

Except for one daughter, his children and grandchildren turned out to be a band of ruthless spongers. And Hokusai himself never did understand about money. He would pay off a shopkeeper’s bill with a packet of yen that he had not even bothered to count. When all such packets were gone, he would escape his creditors by simply moving out of his house. In 89 years, he had 93 homes and used at least 50 names.

Old Man Mad. But for all his eccentricities, he faithfully lived up to the name he gave himself at 45—”The Old Man

Mad About Painting.” He was one of the last of the great masters of the school of the Floating World. The term has never been satisfactorily explained, but many of Hokusai’s creations do have an ethereal quality that makes them seem to hang in midair. Legend has it that some of his drawings were used to wrap up pieces of porcelain that were exported to Paris. In this way, so the story goes, he was discovered by the impressionists.

He was above all a supreme draftsman whose impeccable lines and fragrant colors could bubble with humor or sing with sadness. A drunkard tipsily shows off his strength by weight-lifting a barrel; two men get happily looped on a sake binge; a maiden frowns over a sour note she has struck while tuning her samisen; a ragged little urchin sits perched in a tree while majestic Mount Fuji soars incongruously in the distance. Under Hokusai’s brush, Japan emerges as more than a floating land of stylized ritual: he had learned the secret he did not expect to know until he was no, when “every dot and every line from my brush will be alive.”