Hokusai

At the age of six, Hokusai was said to have painted his first picture, and a year after his death aged 89, his designs for illustrated books were posthumously published. Tracing a long, prolific career, this edition spans each of the artist’s creative phases: from the actor portraits with which Hokusai started out to the 1,300 designs carried out in his final years under the name Manji.

Reproducing 746 woodblock prints, paintings, sketches, and book illustrations, many of them in granular detail, this volume is comfortably the most complete publication on perhaps Japan’s most famous artist. Hokusai’s wide appeal as the recognizable figure of Japan’s Edo period endures to this day: in March 2023, a version of his iconic woodblock print Under the Wave off Kanagawa (or The Great Wave), from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was auctioned for 2.76 million US dollars.

Looking far beyond The Great Wave, this monograph features both familiar and lesser known, rarely reprinted artworks. Entitled The (almost) complete Hokusai, it offers an unmatched variety of subjects and techniques: from a landscape of the Kirifuri Waterfall to large-format maps of the Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō roads and the Bōsō Peninsula; spreads of illustrated books, from his sensual, imaginative erotica (shunga) to drawing manuals such as the fifteen-volume Hokusai manga; and several depictions of animals, from his various woodblock print series on birds and flowers to his later hanging scroll paintings of ducks amidst a flowing stream and a tiger suspended in the snow.

The result of an extensive campaign of new photography, this edition has sourced images of artworks from over 100 institutions worldwide. These include museums and collections from Europe and the United States to Japan, such as the Hiei Shrine at Kisarazu, where a surviving panel painting of a boar hunt at the foot of Mount Fuji was rephotographed for this edition.

Accompanying texts by Andreas Marks place Hokusai’s works in historical context, exploring his influence on Western artists such as Degas and Gauguin despite never leaving Japan himself. Combining rigorous research on the authenticity of Hokusai’s art with extra-large reproductions, including four fold-outs, The (almost) complete Hokusai is both a visual carnival of Edo-period Japan and a significant monograph of scholarly reference.