Word: hokusai
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...punch bowl from a 1931 Cowan Pottery Studio Jazz Bowl Series is a blaze of blue and black abstraction behind a case containing Mayan cylinder vases and Greek oil flasks. Ackley cites two original sites of inquiry: his desire to look at a Goya drawing next to a Hokusai print and his desire to consider Maya drawings on ceramic vessels next to more familiar ancient Greek drawings. Fittingly, they are also two of the most successful pairings. The bold red Mayan ‘drawing’ offsets the Grecian slighter white figure technique. It is often the similarities...
...quality. His treasures, all hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e - "images of the floating world" of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well as images of Westerners relaxing in Yokohama, the port city that became the focus of Japanese contact with the West. Monet had several of Hiroshige's scenes...
...girls at the beach in Les Cousines (1870), downstairs at the Marmottan, to Utagawa Toyokuni's Three Women on a Boat Lamparo Fishing (before 1825), upstairs. Monet's snowscapes, like those he did of Argenteuil, are indirect descendants of the snowy fields and mountains of Hiroshige and Hokusai. The unconventional, asymmetric "snapshot" composition favored by ukiyo-e artists became a hallmark of Impressionism: a good example is the Marmottan's La Barque (1887), in which Monet places the barque, or boat, at the edge of a mostly empty canvas. Hokusai's powerful (and famous) The Great Wave Off the Coast...
...reality, but the way it looks in the artist's imagination. "I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better," Hokusai wrote 16 years before his death at age 89. "At 90, I hope to have caught the very essence of things, so that at 100 I will have reached heavenly mysteries. At 110, every point and line will be living." Monet spent the last decades of his life painting his water lilies, and then...
...modernization and Meiji-era reforms. The Grand Palais show's principal organizer, Guimet curator H?l?ne Bayou, sensibly stops at the late 19th century, when Japanese artists began to look beyond scenes of city life and toward the countryside. Thus, you won't find any works here by Katsushika Hokusai or Ando Hiroshige, two giants of Japanese landscape prints. Less defensibly, you also won't find much about the enormous impact ukiyo-e had on Western artists, especially France's own Impressionists, or even on present-day Japanese comic-strip art forms manga and anim?. And a more adventuresome exhibition might...