Katsushika Hokusai, "Great Wave Off Kanagawa" (c. 1826-33)
How many times in a week do we see a great work of art? I’ve taken this past week to build up my awareness of the ubiquity of masterpieces shown or referenced in the modern media. Think of how many times we’ve seen the Mona Lisa reproduced, referenced, imitated of spoofed. Some paintings we see all of the time and yet most of us don’t really know the painting or the artist. There is this copying this painting, Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. And how many ads during the “dot.com craze” used Rodin’s sculpture of The Thinker? (The worst though is still this spoofing this…. ugh.)
These examples, some innocuous, some plain awful, are just the tip of the iceberg. Think of Michelangelo’s David or his fresco of The Creation in the Sistine Chapel, think of Klimt’s The Kiss, and so on and on and on….. When you force your mind to look for them, works of art (in some form or another) are everywhere. Why is this marketing tactic so successful? Perhaps because familiarity with the works makes us comfortable, and this comfort is something advertisers hope to turn into sales.
All this brings me to the above painting The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai. What is interesting about this piece is that there is no definitive “original” to behold. There are several prints of this throughout the world, all from the same woodblock, now lost. It was one of a series of prints made by Hokusai featuring Mt. Fuji, Japan’s sacred mountain. The Great Wave was a part of the 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series which actually contained 46 prints after public demand returned Hokusai to his studio. But The Great Wave is advertising, pure and simple. During the early to mid-19th C., Japan began to end its self-imposed isolation and tourism became an large part of their economy. Hokusai wished to create for tourists an image that would attract them and later be a way to remember their journey. Great advertisement, then and now. Pay attention. I’m sure you’ve seen The Great Wave…..and, unless you’re lucky, it probably wasn’t in a museum so much as a billboard.
simcoe/ART 
