Dulwich Stages First UK Show of Hokusai's Mount Fuji Series — SkimNews
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- Dulwich Picture Gallery hosts the first exhibition in Britain of Katsushika Hokusai's complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including three original impressions of Under the Wave off Kanagawa ("The Great Wave").
- Hokusai produced the series in the early 1830s using Prussian blue — a pigment first developed in early-18th-century Europe — and reinvented landscape art as a conceptual meditation on impermanence versus the eternal.
- The exhibition reframes Mount Fuji, not the wave, as the series' true protagonist: a Buddhist symbol of enduring truth set against fleeting, illusory storms at sea.
- Cézanne, Monet, Van Gogh, and Whistler all collected or emulated the prints; the review argues Cézanne's repeated Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases and Monet's waterlily garden are direct echoes of Hokusai's metaphysical approach to landscape.
- Jeff Wall restaged Hokusai's Ejiri Station as his 1993 photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) — a contemporary test case of how the 1830s series still circulates through current art.
Why it matters: This is the first time Britain has viewed all 36 prints together, a curatorial event that reweights the familiar Hokusai-influences-modernism story. By foregrounding Fuji as the contemplative anchor behind each scene, the show makes a scholarly case that the series pioneered landscape as spiritual meditation — a move Cézanne and Monet later absorbed wholesale, and that contemporary photographers like Jeff Wall still quarry today.
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