Turner and Hokusai: great contemporaries at the highest summit of art
Nvhen I am asked, Who was the greatest artist of all?', I reply that I can never quite decide whether to pick Turner or Hokusai. These two men were near contemporaries: born in 1760, Hokusai was 15 years older than Turner and died in 1849, just two years before him. Both men were hard at it as fulltime pupils from about seven and devoted themselves entirely to art for the whole of their long lives. Their output was prodigious: Hokusai finished more than 30,000 drawings plus more than 500 illustrated books. Turner's drawings and watercolours number more than 20,000, in addition to 900 oil paintings, many of them very large.
Both started as urchins in huge cities, London and Edo (Tokyo), but expanded their universe to take in the whole of nature. This process of observing and recording was Dever-ceasing. Turner was trying to find new ways to paint mist, vapour, water eddies and wind-flung distances in his late seventies. Hokusai wrote at the age of 74, 'I produced nothing of much value before I was 70. But I am now really beginning to learn. By the time I am 110, each individual dot or line I draw will possess its own life.'
These super-industrious men had widely different attitudes to money. Turner drove hard bargains, saved money, invested it wisely. From quite an early age he thus acquired absolute freedom over his art and life, the ability to travel where he wished to pursue the images he found worth recording, and to sell, or not, his works, increasingly retaining the best for the nation. His spending was all art-related: from his teens he used earnings to buy the best available paper and other materials. Turner's relationship with the tools of his trade remained throughout life intense, passionate and rich in mystery. Hokusai was, in all essentials, exactly the same, as we can tell by his various essays in drawing artists' workshops (his own). And it is clear that he, too, bought the best, especially brushes. Hokusai was always in frantic employment. Like Turner he worked for the mass market of prints as well as for individual collectors. But he was poor. He lacked the ability to make a home, to amass things, even to stay still. He changed his quarters 93 times. A quick, jerking, whiskery, bright-eyed little gentleman, like one of the furry monkeys he drew, he described himself as 'The Old Man mad with painting'. Oh, to have a drawing — by Lawrence, say, or Ingres, of the pair of them: the old bag of bones, hair and rags, alongside Turner with his paint-spattered top hat and disreputable swallow-tailed coat.
Both men could operate on any scale. Holcusai's most powerful effects were of the plum blossom set out in ink and watercolour, each of the minute strokes placed with infinite accuracy — and yet with dash — on the paper, which opens up its eager pores to receive them. He could do, in an inch or two, a greedy monkey in a bright-red jacket munching stolen peaches, so that the fur seems warm to the eye and the running juice of the fruit exudes almost palpable sweemess. Sometimes he seems to have operated on a huge scale just for the glory of it. He painted works of up to 200 square metres, using vast sheets of paper, a brush like a broom, and buckets of ink and paint. This easy control of scale has never been exercised more freely, with the flick of a sinewy brown wrist. Hokusai pinned down vast horizons of Japanese landscape and seascape using bare lines and simple washes. One reason why his 'Wave' has imprinted itself on minds the world over is its majestic yet minute manipulation of scale — it overwhelms us yet is there, at our fingertips, a few inches of blue-and-white marks on paper. In the same way a malevolent furry tiger wriggles its way across the page, muscles writhing, and gives us a frisson.
Turner played with scale with the same familiarity. I often think the best sheets he ever produced were a half-dozen on grey paper, six by ten inches at most, which he did in watercolour on his first visit to Venice in 1819. Just a few wet strokes in each case, no detail but catching the light eagerly at dawn or sunset, in one case high noon, so that Venice and its waters cease to be slabs of stone and liquid but become mere receptacles for the sun and glow as though weightless — immense vistas pinned down by flickering brushwork in a few seconds and inches. These little gems were not seen by human eyes, except his, until long after his death. Yet Turner could then, by switching his position in his studio, turn from his writing table to his scaffolding easels and suddenly open up vast abysses, scores of feet square, in which the eye drops through the sides of jagged fissures deep into the bowels of the high Alps, cataclysmic falls made terrifying by deft constructions of dark watercolour masses, or slithering impasto in the big oil paintings. A Turner canvas can yawn to engulf you, or heave itself up to tower over you like
Holcusai's wave, and threaten to bury you under a trillion square feet of rock, ice and mud. These big canvases swirl together immense quantities of broken cloud, mist, swiftly moving and re-forming vapours, which both reflect the light and obscure it, and are so uncontrollable that they threaten to escape from the canvas on which Turner barely imprisoned them and invade the room where you watch, reeking with high fog and dripping with moisture — you are on the mountain yourself, unsure of foot or direction, and if one of Turner's great precipices should suddenly open up with a palpable surge of wind from its depths, you might topple over it.
Where Turner and Hokusai differed fundamentally was in their treatment of animate creatures. Turner's listless and dumb-feeling drawing of figures betrays an almost complete lack of interest in the human form, By contrast, Hokusai is so radically fascinated by animation of limbs that he sometimes cannot stop himself drawing them — his little brown hand covers entire large sheets of paper as they writhe and struggle, sprint and reach out, handle bundles and scrubbing brushes, splash in tubs or propel boats through rainpelted waters. You see the languorous bodies of the 'beauties' or 'courtesans' under their silken robes because Hokusai plays games with you, and himself, in suggesting their presence. He slyly shows the difference between a professional lady who covers her limbs with infinite art, so that nature and its adornment are almost one, and the genuine article, a brilliant cock pheasant whose plumes are actually a part of its body, a work of art he paints with such tenderness as to turn the page into an act of worship.
With Turner, the humans are marginal, almost invisible. But human or animate life is always there, absorbed wholly into the mountains or moors, crystallised into the river and lakes, present and inhabiting the cloud landscape and imperious visions whipped up by tempest, sun-furnaces and polar turbulence which make his canvases pulsate with activity, terrestrial and celestial.
I have been inspired to put down these thoughts by digging into the magnificent volume on Hokusai published by Phaidon last year, the best I own on the master. It comes close to epitomising him. You can, indeed, put the little man in a book, By contrast, I have more than 60 books on Turner and none can even begin to contain him. So perhaps after all he is the greater.
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