22 SEPTEMBER 1967, Page 16

Queer fish

ART PAUL GRINKE

The Anthony d'Offay gallery, with laudable enterprise and scrupulous attention to detail, has mounted the first show of Hokusai draw- , ings to be seen this century at any London • .: dealers. Writing in 1863, only ten years after Perry's famous expedition, W. M. Rossetti ; noted the 'daringness of conception' which he found in Japanese art, and also singled out Hokusai as 'a special master among the pro- ducers of the encyclopaedic woodcut-books.' Brave words for the 1860s, when Japanese art was a barbaric novelty and it would still be many years before the Impressionists found in Japanese prints an encouragement or their own experiments.

To a European eye one of the most remark- able aspects of these drawings is their ability to capture and isolate a moment in time and " its accompanying mood, to arrest movement in a way which seemed impossible, at least until Muybridge's photographic studies of men and animals in motion, and to savour that moment with a genuinely heightened perception. The studies of fighting men, that endless Japanese fascination in legend and life with what Ros- setti calls a 'scrimmage,' all show the grappling

r figures in apparently impossible though aesthe- tically convincing attitudes. Warriors gyrate in the air and land with their feet straddled in a rictus of distorted tension, while the opponent takes a header to the other side of the paper. On a quieter domestic front, in the studies of bijin-ga, or beautiful girls, a lady turns her head and a guttering candle emits a shaky coldmn , of smoke; a door has opened off stage, the pro- ducer cries out, the moment is faultlessly re- corded to be reconstructed a century later.

Comparisons with master draughtsmen of the

" west, Rembrandt, Ingres or Goya, which have frequently. been made, are, I think, specious attempts to bridge the gap from the known to the unknown. The delicate opacity of the paper and deep octopus black of the ink which Hokusai favoured are an alien medium; and the characters and scenes he depicts have no real counterpart in western iconography. His conception of space and his ordering of the line to 'fill it are again quite unlike any western notion of drawing. Mr Hillier in his catalogue introduction refers to the humour implicit in many of the drawings. This, too, is an art which . has had few real exponents, outside the limi:s of satire, and Hokusai's drawings range in mood from bubbling high spirits to true pathos.

Seen in the context of Japanese art Hokusai's achievement is perhaps less immediately.'-strik- ing, though his range and subtlety are remark- able by any standards. He drew incessantly throughout a long life. He went through any number of styles and changed his name each time to commemorate the latest twist in the path to. perfection. Looking back on his career in 1834 he wrote, with great modesty : '1 am dissatisfied with everything which I produced before the age of seventy. It was at the age of seventy-three that I nearly mastered the real nature and form of birds, fishes,. plants, etc. Consequently at the age of eighty, I shall have got to the bottom of things; at a hundred 1 ,hall

'have attained a decidedly higher level which 1 cannot define, and at the age of 110 every clot

• and every line from my brush will be alive. He died at the age of eighty-nine.