The Great Wave by Katsushika Hokusai

A true eccentric artist as we might picture some wacky bohemian Parisian genius, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was way ahead of his time in certain ways. An incredibly prolific Japanese painter and free-spirited albeit difficult soul long before Japan ever opened its doors to the West, and to our picture of eccentric artists, his extraordinary woodblock print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa at the Hakone Museum in Japan is certainly one of his best and well-known Japanese prints. It had quite an early fan following too, by the way, having been adopted for the cover picture of the first edition of "The Sea" ("La mer,Trois esquisesymphoniques") by Claude Debussy way back in 1905.

In The Great Wave we see three boats which are being tossed about mercilessly by the turbulent waves of Tokyo's harbour while the enormous and sacred Mt. Fuji, in this instance hundreds of miles away, appears to be just a small, insignificant hill in the all too far distance. The impending destruction by this mountainous wall of water, strangely taking place under what otherwise appears to be a perfectly sunny sky, brings a tension to the painting that connotes a sense of doom. Also, by selecting these fishermen as subjects, Hokusai also provocatively chose to break with tradition and depict common people and their swift boats instead of painting more traditional subjects like shoguns and nobility.

This is perhaps what makes Hokusai more interesting to us today than the many other Japanese artists of his era. Although he is perhaps Japan's best known artist, at least in the West, because of these subtle differences in subject matter and style (he was secretly and highly influenced from the West, this knowledge illegally acquired by him at his own risk), Hokusai is in this way, strangely, one of the most un-Japanese of Japanese artists.
His very eccentricity and stubborn individuality have more likely than not opened up his work to larger audiences. On the one hand, The Great Wave shows the awesome power of nature (much larger than the holy mountain of Fuji itself) and the tininess of man and of all human endeavours, but on the other hand he celebrates human courage and the will and the strength that are necessary to go out into the waves and fight these very forces. The picture intentionally gives no indication of who shall win the battle in the end, but it seems to be telling us that the fighting of the battle itself is all that matters.