Word: hokusai
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Vincent was ill when he arrived in Aries, jittery from booze, racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough, that the place would look like one of the Japanese prints by Hokusai or Utamaro that had been circulating among avant-garde painters in Paris. In a way it did: the ground was covered with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted, and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets...
Just to mention Japanese woodcuts is to evoke the name of Hokusai (1760-1849), who produced some of the finest examples of the genre. In The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (Sotheby Parke Bernet/ University of California; 288 pages; $110), Scholar Jack Hillier explores seven decades of artistry. Hokusai, who began by illustrating cheap 18th century novelettes known as kibyŏshi ("yellow-backs"), was prolific; he once illustrated 61 volumes of a Chinese classic. As Hillier observes, the man was an "encyclopedist of Japanese life and custom." That life and custom included portraiture, nature studies and some explicit...
...Wrong Turning. At age seven, when he was visiting an exhibition of Japanese paintings, he discovered the important secret about himself-"I am a born visualizer." Roughly in this order he began to paint in the style of Hokusai, Degas, Gauguin, Whistler and Matisse. By the time he reached Oxford, he knew he was not an artist; but he was irrevocably attached to the scale of the masterpiece-what a friend, Classicist Maurice Bowra, called "big stuff...
...OTTOKAR'S SCEPTRE. All written and illustrated by Hergé. All 62 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. Paperback $1.95 each. No one should be put off by Tintin himself, a boy in knickers with a muffin face and a tuft of hair rising to a curled peak like a Hokusai wave. Or by Captain Haddock, his bearded rum-sodden sidekick. Or by the small white dog, known as Milou in the original French versions of these stories, but for some inexplicable reason called Snowy in English...
...could be, in the grace of God, that I shall live to be 89, as did Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: "If God had let me live five years longer, I should have been a writer...