The Great Wave off Kanagawa
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a famous woodblock printing by the Japanese artist Hokusai.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (New York) writes on “The Great Wave at Kanagawa” :
The preeminence of this print—said to have inspired both Debussy’s “La Mer” and Rilke’s “Der Berg”—can be attributed, in addition to its sheer graphic beauty, to the compelling force of the contrast between the wave and the mountain. The turbulent wave seems to tower above the viewer, whereas the tiny stable pyramid of Mount Fuji sits in the distance. The eternal mountain is envisioned in a single moment frozen in time.
Hokusai characteristically cast a traditional theme in a novel interpretation. In the traditional “meisho-e” (scene of a famous place), Mount Fuji was always the focus of the composition. Hokusai inventively inverted this formula and positioned a small Mount Fuji within the midst of a thundering seascape.
Foundering among the great waves are three boats thought to be barges conveying fish from the southern islands of Edo (modern Tokyo). Thus a scene of everyday labor is grafted onto the seascape view of the mountain.
There was a great doco on this painting a few years ago. Not sure if it was BBC or from the US. I am sure you could track it down. I was vaguely familiar with it beforehand but now I really like it and here I am googling it today!
There was a great doco on this painting a few years ago. Not sure if it was BBC or from the US. I am sure you could track it down. I was vaguely familiar with it beforehand but now I really like it and here I am googling it today!
[...] Cranes vectored from this stock photo by FantasyStock, and the wave is obviously vectored off of Hokusai’s iconic print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” [...]
This print was include in the recent BBC series The History of the World in 100 Objects. The interpretation placed on the scale of the wave in relation to the boats and MT Fuji was based on the swamping of the tradition Japanese isolation by a western world insistant on Japan allowing free trade….
[...] funny brain think it was a priority? The shape of this melting snow reminded me of Hokusai’s The Great Wave print. Don’t expect sequiturs, my friends, at least not [...]
[...] for millennia. As Ben MacIntyre was quick to point out in Saturday’s Times, the artist Katsushika Hokusai’s famous 1830 woodblock print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa looks like a tsunami wave, something which had not occurred to me, though the interpretation is [...]
[...] for millennia. As Ben MacIntyre was quick to point out in Saturday’s Times, the artist Katsushika Hokusai’s famous 1830 woodblock print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa looks like a tsunami wave, something which had not occurred to me, though the interpretation is [...]
[...] The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a famous woodblock printing by the Japanese artist Hokusai [...]
[...] The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a famous woodblock printing by the Japanese artist Hokusai [...]
Great Wave off Kanagawa is amazing! It’s great to see someone else appreciating this fine piece of Japanese art, thanks for blogging about it!
[...] enjoyed the reference to Hokusai’s famous print, “The Great Wave” behind the characters. Here’s some more of their [...]
good it’s called- “The Great wave of Kanagawa” – OF NOT OFF