Hokusai
200Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)Availability: In Stock“The most thoroughly researched monograph on Hokusai ever to be published.”
“A magnificent book from TASCHEN brings together a huge part of his work. The goal of the editor, Andreas Marks, to question the common image of Hokusai and to replace it with a more differentiated one, is visible on every page of this tremendous monograph.”
“A monumental monograph.”
“This voluminous book is arguably the most comprehensive study of Hokusai’s work to date. It packs an impressive volume of works from the deep well of the Japanese artist and printmaker’s long career, far beyond his omnipresent depictions of Mount Fuji.”
“[A] sumptuous, beautifully produced art book unfolds Hokusai’s 19th-century Edo, the floating world where everything — mountains, moons and masked actors, courtesans, crustaceans, cherry blossom — is stylised into patterns of line and colour, yet flutters off the page, restless and vital.”
“At 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at 110, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine are not false.”
Hokusai
200Hokusai Maximus
The most distinguished artist of Edo-period Japan, explored like never before
At the age of six, Hokusai was said to have painted his first picture, and a year after his death aged 89, his designs for illustrated books were posthumously published. Tracing a long, prolific career, this edition spans each of the artist’s creative phases: from the actor portraits with which Hokusai started out to the 1,300 designs carried out in his final years under the name Manji.
Reproducing 746 woodblock prints, paintings, sketches, and book illustrations, many of them in granular detail, this volume is comfortably the most complete publication on perhaps Japan’s most famous artist. Hokusai’s wide appeal as the recognizable figure of Japan’s Edo period endures to this day: in March 2023, a version of his iconic woodblock print Under the Wave off Kanagawa (or The Great Wave), from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was auctioned for 2.76 million US dollars.
Looking far beyond The Great Wave, this monograph features both familiar and lesser known, rarely reprinted artworks. Entitled The (almost) complete Hokusai, it offers an unmatched variety of subjects and techniques: from a landscape of the Kirifuri Waterfall to large-format maps of the Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō roads and the Bōsō Peninsula; spreads of illustrated books, from his sensual, imaginative erotica (shunga) to drawing manuals such as the fifteen-volume Hokusai manga; and several depictions of animals, from his various woodblock print series on birds and flowers to his later hanging scroll paintings of ducks amidst a flowing stream and a tiger suspended in the snow.
The result of an extensive campaign of new photography, this edition has sourced images of artworks from over 100 institutions worldwide. These include museums and collections from Europe and the United States to Japan, such as the Hiei Shrine at Kisarazu, where a surviving panel painting of a boar hunt at the foot of Mount Fuji was rephotographed for this edition.
Accompanying texts by Andreas Marks place Hokusai’s works in historical context, exploring his influence on Western artists such as Degas and Gauguin despite never leaving Japan himself. Combining rigorous research on the authenticity of Hokusai’s art with extra-large reproductions, including four fold-outs, The (almost) complete Hokusai is both a visual carnival of Edo-period Japan and a significant monograph of scholarly reference.
The author
Andreas Marks studied East Asian art history at the University of Bonn and obtained his PhD in Japanology from Leiden University with a thesis on 19th-century actor prints. From 2008 to 2013 he was director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art in Hanford, California, and since 2013 has been the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In 2024, he was awarded the commendation of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his contributions to the promotion of Japanese culture.
Hokusai
Hardcover, with ribbon bookmark, 29 x 39.5 cm, 6.95 kg, 722 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-9188-1
Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)5