Hokusai: A Life in Drawing

Katsushika Hokusai is one of the most famous artists of ancient Japan. Hokusai (1760-1849) was a universal genius in all things drawing and painting in his time. He practiced all genres of ukiyo-e, those "images of the floating world," as his contemporaries liked to describe their pleasures and their daily lives. With a body of more than 30,000 drawings and paintings, Hokusai was the most prolific, varied and unquestionably the most creative artist of ancient Japan.

The blue, foam-headed wave rising above Mount Fuji; the famous volcano idealized and reinvented by the artist in every nuance of view, season and painting; the extraordinary bridges, the waterfalls of Japan, the twists, costumes, gestures - the breath of men, women, farmers, townspeople, warriors, craftsmen, leaping horses, birds, insects, fish, almost living on the ground on which they are painted - the innumerable imaginative drawings or the vivid sketches made on the spot for the Manga, Hokusai's capture of forms taken from life or invented over time.

This coffee table book traces the career of Hokusai, a child from a working-class neighborhood of old Tokyo, then known as Edo, and evokes the special atmosphere of this great city and of Japanese life, when Japan - closed to foreigners - developed a powerfully original culture in a vacuum. Hokusai became one of the great masters of woodcut. This "feral brush," as he called himself, was rediscovered by impressionists and aesthetes in the late 19th century. He remains one of the greatest and - thanks to his personality - one of the most attractive figures of world art.

Specifications
Title: Hokusai: A Life in Drawing
Author: Henri-Alexis Baatsch
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Size: 368 x 289 x 41 3mm
Size: 224 pages
Weight: 294 grams
Language: English
Material: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780500028711

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