One Fine Show: ‘Hokusai, Waves of Inspiration’ at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Welcome to one fine show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The only art history class I took as an undergrad was on post-war Asian art. It was taught by an amazing professor from Canada, who told us that he had come to love Japanese art in his own twenties, when he was taking a lot of psilocybin and traveled the country by rail. He would stay at Japan’s famous “love hotels,” which are mainly for people having affairs and therefore cheaper at night. For him, all Japanese art emerged from The Great Wave Off Kanagawa—everything from anime to Yoko Ono. Its influence could not be overstated.

“Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration” just opened at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and diagrams the career of the Edo-era painter and printmaker, from his own inspirations to those he inspired in turn. The show features roughly 100 works by Katsushika Hokusai (c.1760-1849) and “200 additional works by the artist’s teachers, family, students, rivals and worldwide admirers.”

Hokusai studied under Katsukawa Shunshō and started out as your standard ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) painter of beautiful upper-class women and kabuki actors, such popular art functioning as the Vanity Fair of its time. But even in this genre, he excelled. New Year’s Day at the Ōgiya Brothel, Yoshiwara (1808-1813) is all about rhythm: your eye follows the flow of gossiping women as it roams the incredible architectural design.

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Similar to this is his phenomenal work with monsters and ghosts. Such illustrations were intended to chill in the summer months, and Newly Published Perspective Picture: One Hundred Ghost Stories in a Haunted House (1780s) shows remarkable inventiveness in the ghouls he paints his building with here, instead of women, and so does his later isolated work with demons. Such work made him a household name.

But today, we love Hokusai for the wave and his landscapes, which he mastered by learning Western-style perspective, with a horizon, from European and European-inspired Chinese prints, a relatively new artistic technology for Edo Japan. Almost as popular as The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1830-1831) is his Red Fiji (1830-1831) from his color print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, where the sky seems to devour the clouds in morsels.

His most skilled pupil was probably his own daughter, Katsushika Ōi. Her Three Women Playing Musical Instruments (1820-1830) in this show seems to bring his skill in architecture, landscape and flow to the interactions between the three women. This show cements his legacy, not that it needed any help.

“Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration” is on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art through January 5, 2025.