BOOK:Hokusai,Taschen Publications

Katsushika Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through over 30 pseudonyms. Hokusai  is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh. Hokusai’s print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount” (ca. 1830-34) Fuji, is the artist’s most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The book Hokusai by Taschen publications acts as an introduction for his work and spans the length and breadth of Hokusai’s career with key pieces from his far-reaching portfolio. The book traces the variety of Hokusai’s subjects, from erotic books to historical novels, and the evolution of his vivid formalism and decisive delineation of space through color and line that would go on to liberate Western art from the constraints of its one-point perspective and unleash the modernist momentum.-Efi Michalarou