New on show this week: Mount Fuji rises serenely at Musée Guimet
A Paris exhibition presents rare snowscapes from fragile ukiyo-e woodblock prints
The time is out of joint. A hawk dives over bare, frozen marshland in Hiroshige’s “Jumantsobo Plain”. A few travellers wobble on a snow-laden pontoon in Hokusai’s “Boat Bridge at Sano”. A white mountain peak rises in a black frame, a dramatic picture within a picture, or view through a window, for Utamaro’s gang of courtesans “Laughing Women”.
So winter descends in midsummer in one of Paris’s very few new exhibitions of the season: Musée Guimet’s Fuji, Land of Snow. Opened last week, this presentation of rare, ethereally delicate snowscapes from ukiyo-e woodblock prints, too fragile to be often exposed, considers from an oblique, refined, historical angle several preoccupying themes of recent months: beauty wrought from mutability and desolation; nature and man; artifice and interiority.
Around 1830, 70-year-old Hokusai became obsessed with Mount Fuji as symbol of monumentality yet transience. His perfectly cone-shaped, eternally snow-capped volcano - glowing red at dawn in “Fine Wind, Clear Morning”, cut with jagged lightening under pellucid skies in “Rainstorm beneath the Summit”, towering serenely over abstracted bands of white-green waterlogged fields where peasants lead oxen top-heavy with reed bundles, in “New Paddies at Ono” - is perhaps the most famous emblem in all art of nature as steadfast and mighty in the face of changing weather, light, seasons, everyday human life.
If Hokusai is inevitably the heart of the show, the Guimet, one of Europe’s great museums of Asian art, adds to our understanding of his celebrated images by context: two centuries of printmaking innovation emerging and consolidated within an affluent, self-aware society.
The show begins in the first half of the 18th century, with self-taught Okumura Masanobu’s monochrome, lacquer-like “Itinerant Monk Observing Mount Fuji”, and concludes with Hasui Kawase’s melancholy vision of a city shrouded in a film of blue, “Snow at Shiobara” from 1946 — after Hiroshima. In the 1760s Suzuki Harunobu, from a wealthy samurai family surrounded by connoisseur collectors, pushed the ukiyo-e form into colour, thickly, luxuriantly applied, in contrast to his thin, light figures such as “Young Woman in the Snow”, who seem to float through space. By the late 19th century the print had mass, patriotic appeal: Mizuno Toshikata’s “Seven Courageous Soldiers” commemorates Weihaiwei, the winter battle of the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.
The snow motif is an inspired point of connection across centuries, and allows insight into the genre’s technical inventiveness: snow suggested by leaving the paper blank, flakes by carving nicks out of surface colour to imply softly falling flecks, white pigment flicked on or brushed through a stencil. The suppression of depths for flatness, expanses of strong colour, bold outlines, were inestimable gifts to the Parisian avant-garde when Japan opened to world trade in the 1850s-60s.
Hokusai’s tremendous “Turban-shell Hall of the Five-Hundred Rakan Temple”, for example — a group on a balcony enjoying a panoramic view of Fuji, with different vanishing points — was the model for Monet’s design and multiple perspectives of figures gazing out to sea from a terrace in his landmark 1867 “Garden at Sainte-Adresse”. It is flat, glittery-bright, a painting, like Hokusai’s, about the pleasure of looking, which radically declared its own pictorial artifice.
Japanese art offered the Impressionists stylisation without abandoning depiction of nature, a lineage extending from Van Gogh to Hockney — joyful and consoling then and now.
‘Fuji, Land of Snow’, Musée Guimet, Paris, to October 12 guimet.fr/event/fuji-pays-de-neige/