Hokusai’s art has long been filtered through the story of European modernism, yet this exhibition which has just opened at the Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome offers the chance to encounter him on his own terms: as an artist of extraordinary humanity, formal brilliance, and timeless relevance. Moving between market insight, personal reflection, and close looking, this text considers why his work still speaks so powerfully to us today.
Text by Jo Vickery
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is a quintessential example of an artist whose work continues to speak eloquently and with authenticity across generations and cultures. Immersing oneself in his art, one may choose to engage with its historical context or simply respond to the profound humanity that radiates from it. In Hokusai’s world, people remain part of nature, at one with the elements; it feels like a lost paradise. Even in his iconic Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa, where the figures in the boats are literally cradled by the immense swell of the sea, the sense of danger is secondary to the overwhelming force of nature itself. What remains is not fear, but awe: the dizzying power of the elements. Like his near contemporary J.M.W. Turner, Hokusai seems prescient of the modern era. His focus on genre scenes may root his work in its own epoch, yet the purity of his colour, the clarity of his forms, and the strength of his patterns feel astonishingly modern. One must constantly remind oneself that these works were made more than two centuries ago, I love this fact.
Prints and works on paper are easy to underestimate for all sorts of reasons. And one of the most overlooked areas of the art market remains that of works on paper, a category that includes printed material produced through a remarkably wide variety of techniques. Yet there is often a familiar arc in collecting: newer collectors begin with works on paper because they appear more affordable, while more mature collectors later return to them for entirely different reasons, recognising their sophistication, rarity, and historical importance. Hokusai produced thousands of impressions of the Great Wave, yet only a few hundred are known to survive today. They appear regularly at major international auctions; the most recent record was set at Christie’s New York in 2023, when an impression sold for $2.76 million. Earlier editions, with stronger colours and sharper lines, command the highest prices. Condition is exceptionally important in works on paper, since restoration and cleaning can be particularly challenging. As a result, a significant premium is placed on impressions that have survived the centuries in fresh, untouched condition.
The current exhibition in Rome at the Palazzo Bonaparte sits in a curious dialogue with the city’s Baroque architecture and classical archaeology, and is not, at first glance, an obvious home for this refined Japanese master of the humble print. Yet this is perhaps one of its strengths. Even on the opening day, the galleries were half empty and dimly lit, allowing for an unusually contemplative encounter with the works. The curators have added objects from the period to provide historical context, as well as a room of fun visual projections, but in truth for those of us art lovers and collectors the works require very little mediation. They speak entirely for themselves.
Like many students of art history in the West, I first encountered Hokusai unexpectedly and out of context: as a conduit to understanding Western European modernism.This exhibition gave me the opportunity to encounter him anew, to understand his work more fully, and to reconfigure what he means to me, so that he has become not merely a signpost, but one of the greatest artists in world art. There is his innate sense of colour, pattern, and rhythm; his inexhaustible inventiveness — one need only count the many ways he depicts water, whether as wave, sea, or multicoloured waterfall. There is also a gentleness in his work, a sense that time has momentarily come to rest: a girl making tea, a fisherman at work. And then there is the way his images seem to form part of a single, organically unfolding body of work, evolving gradually over the course of a long life, as the artist continued to live and work until the age of eighty-eight.
Speaking of modernism, Van Gogh famously wrote of Hokusai’s Great Wave: “These waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.” Like Van Gogh, Hokusai lived much of his life in poverty, famously moving house repeatedly and inhabiting chaotic, crowded conditions — a far cry from the peace, elegance, and harmony of his art.
He is often associated with the “floating world”, a translation of the Japanese ukiyo, a term that refers to the pleasures and passing experiences of urban life: theatre, travel, leisure, and the fleeting fabric of the everyday. Hokusai captured his fellow countrymen and women engaged in daily activities across the social spectrum, always with an eye for the beauty he found in them and an underlying sense of impermanence. In this respect, one might draw a loose parallel with France at the turn of the last century, where artists likewise turned to modern life around them, capturing fleeting moments in the city. There is, perhaps, a distant connection between the floating world of Edo Japan, a time of cultural growth and social stability, and French Impressionism. Part of the enduring value of such works lies precisely in their delight in everyday life, and in the suggestion that even the smallest moment is sufficient to affirm and celebrate human existence. In other words, we do not need myth or illusion: we can grasp humanity’s essence in the shifting world, values alien to Classical Rome.
Hokusai also overturns the popular, if fanciful, notion that artists reach their peak in early or middle life, only then to decline into repetition and diminishing importance. He produced what is widely regarded as his greatest work late in life. His most famous series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — which includes The Great Wave — was created when he was around seventy, and he continued working well into his eighties. A man of relatively few words, he nevertheless famously remarked that he had only begun truly to understand art in his seventies. There is no cult of youth here, no mythology of the prodigy. Hokusai began by spending many years in the studio system, largely designing prints in the manner of his master, and only truly forged his independent path after his master’s death.
What does Hokusai have to teach us today, nearly three centuries later? In a world increasingly defined by urbanisation, digitisation, and alienation from genuine social interaction, his work reminds us that there are other values and other ways of living. It encourages us to put down our phones and simply look around us: even in the heart of the city, one may still find a quiet moment in a park, or a fleeting instant of stillness. Hokusai shows us that there is profound power in such moments, and in the act of truly seeing them.
