Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760–1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of Japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh.

Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through over 30 pseudonyms. In his art, he adopted the same restlessness, covering the complete spectrum of Japanese ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world”, from single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors to erotic books. In addition, he created album prints, illustrations for verse anthologies and historical novels, and surimono, which were privately issued prints for special occasions.

Hokusai’s print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published between c. 1830 and 1834 is the artist’s most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The series Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known simply as The Great Wave, is one of the most recognized images of Japanese art in the world.

This TASCHEN introduction spans the length and breadth of Hokusai’s career with key pieces from his far-reaching portfolio. Through these meticulous, majestic works and series, we trace the variety of Hokusai’s subjects, from erotic books to historical novels, and the evolution of his vivid formalism and decisive delineation of space through colour and line that would go on to liberate Western art from the constraints of its one-point perspective and unleash the modernist momentum.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

A one-of-a-kind book of pop-ups based on the works of the Japanese artist Hokusai

Hokusai (1760–1849) was an extraordinarily prolific Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’) genre. More than 150 years after his death, his legacy remains as important as any Western painter’s. His work inspired a roll-call of great artists including Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Manet, Degas and Klimt as well as craftsmen and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now available again, this delightful selection of prints depicting nineteenth-century Japan’s natural beauty is a colorful introduction to the country’s most beloved artist.

The Japanese artist Hokusai spent the second half of his life sketching and painting with tremendous energy nearly everything he saw, and this book focuses on one of his most productive periods, when the artist was in his seventies. This book presents fifty works of the artist’s astonishing oeuvre. It includes selections from his renowned series of woodblock prints, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including “In the Hollow of a Wave,” “Shower below the Summit,” and “South Wind at Clear Dawn.” Also presented are images of flowers, waterfalls, bridges, birds, and fish, demonstrating the uniquely precise yet passionate quality of Hokusai’s art. An expert on the artist’s work, Matthi Forrer provides illuminating commentary on Hokusai’s life and technique, offering insight into his enduring popularity throughout the world.

This book contains more than 350 masterworks of artists such as Hiroshite, Utamaro, Harunobu, Eisen and Hokusai, all from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum

150 full-colour illustrations

Katsushika Hokusai is without a doubt the most famous Japanese artist known in the Western world since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Reflecting the artistic expression of an isolated civilisation, the works of Hokusai, one of the first Japanese artists to emerge in Europe, greatly influenced Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, such as Vincent van Gogh.
Considered a Ukiyo-e master even during his lifetime, Hokusai fascinates us with the variety and the significance of his work which spanned almost ninety years and is presented here in all its breadth and diversity.

About the author
Friend of Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert and Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt was a French writer belonging to the naturalist movement. Eyewitness to the events of the worldly and artistic life of the second half of the nineteenth century, his major work remains the Journal written with his brother, Jules. Beginning in 1850, they collaborated on history books, most notably treating painting, such as Eighteenth Century Art. Impassioned by the delicate beauty of the Japanese woodblock prints, Edmond de Goncourt became, through his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai, one of the first to reveal the magnificence of this art to the Western world.

This big and beautiful book presents a comprehensive survey of the work of one of Japan’s greatest and most influential artists, together with a collection of essays that focus on a key aspects of the master’s career. The book opens with an introductory essay by Gian Carlo Calza presenting an overview of the changing world Hokusai was born into and lived through. This is followed by a series of essays by distinguished Western and Japanese scholars that present new research on a range of crucial areas of interest in Hokusai studies. These form a context for the core of the book, which forms a retrospective of Hokusai’s entire career, divided into seven chapters. Each chapter provides a succinct account of a phase in Hokusai’s life, followed by a series of the finest and most representative works of that period. Great care has been taken throughout to choose for reproduction the best-preserved original prints that reveal Hokusai’s mastery of line and colour to full advantage. This magnificent pictorial survey of Hokusai’s prints, paintings and drawings is the first publication in English to make such a rich selection widely available, and to demonstrate the extraordinary range and quality of Hokusai’s achievement. The final component of the book is a detailed scholarly commentary on each illustration that provides not only the necessary technical information but also a revealing analysis of style, colour, composition and motif.