A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion

Early spring. A heavy sky. Chilly, but not bitter. We’re near Suruga Bay, on the south coast of Honshu; maybe you can taste the salt in the air.

The year is 1830 or so: the waning days of the Tokugawa shogunate. And from the northwest, a wind is blowing with the force of a steamroller.

It’s not his most famous work, but this is my favorite woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai: “Ejiri in Suruga Province.” It’s the 10th image in his renowned cycle “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.”

I love it most for how it captures an instant, with an exactitude that feels almost photographic. Here. Now. A country road, two trees, daytime: hold onto your hats.

And for something else: the story it tells about how images circulate in a cosmopolitan world.

Today Hokusai stands — for Western audiences, and in Asia too — at the pinnacle of “Japanese art.” But if you told the grandees of 19th-century Edo that Hokusai would become the most famous artist in the country’s history, they’d never believe you.

Woodblock prints like his — called Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” and turned out by the thousands in private printing houses — were considered vulgar, commercial images.

How does a single artist — of mass-market pictures, no less — come to embody a national culture?

Let’s start with the road. A serpentine passage cuts through an ordinary little marsh, on a highway that connects Kyoto to Edo (now Tokyo). No graceful landscape, this. We’re somewhere commonplace, undistinguished.

Most of the marsh grasses are billowing gently. But the gusting wind has bent the trees, and it’s blowing the young leaves right off their branches.

More than in the landscape, you see the wind’s strength in the travelers’ bodies. This figure has stepped off the road, and is gripping his hat with both hands. His body is crumpled. The gusting wind has bent him, literally, out of shape.

These two walkers are also leaning into the wind, though they appear to be pressing on with their journey. Crouched down, one foot in front of the other.

This drab country road is a crossroads of classes. In the foreground, walking in the other direction, is this gentleman, able to hang onto his hat with just one hand.

We know he’s at least moderately wealthy, because he’s not traveling alone. He’s walking with a porter, who is having worse luck.

On his head is a circular cushion . . .

from which his woven hat has blown right off.

He’s the only traveler with a clearly visible face: male, middle age? And yet we have hardly more insight into his life than his fellow commuters’. This print is not a character study.

Look closely at its most compelling figure: a woman whose striped blue kimono has blown into her face. A sheaf of papers she’s been carrying has been tossed into the air. They could be a poetry manuscript, or property deeds. Some scholars identify the fugitive sheets as tissues the woman would be carrying under her kimono.

It hardly matters who she is. It hardly matters what the papers say. They’re going everywhere, each one a little vacuum of white in the reedy green.

Sudden accidents, trivial messes, the thousand natural shocks of travel.

It all means nothing to the trees, the marsh, and the mountain: Mount Fuji, impassive in the back.

or an obscure little knoll, swallowed up by a clawing tsunami.

Fuji is so modest, in this most famous of the “Thirty-Six Views,” that some viewers confuse it for foam on the waves. And that, too, is a clue to Hokusai’s transcultural meaning.

The little Fuji, beneath the waves, sits at the composition’s vanishing point: a hallmark of Renaissance image-making. Hokusai was among the first Japanese artists to employ Western perspective, though he used it playfully.

During Hokusai’s lifetime, Japanese were barred from leaving the country, on pain of death. But the country was not totally closed. Some foreign goods could come in, via Nagasaki — such as the rich Prussian blue ink used here.

And some foreign techniques, too.

Do you see, here, how the traveler in the back is so much smaller than the woman who’s lost her papers? And how sharply the landscape slopes up? Hokusai would have picked up this perspectival technique from Dutch prints circulating in Edo . . .

even as elsewhere, in the same image, Hokusai employs a perspectival technique common in Asian painting, with similarly sized figures positioned along diagonal sightlines. That, too, was imported knowledge, absorbed from Chinese examples into earlier Japanese painting.

Even in a “closed” Japan, Hokusai was weaving together a lavish array of cosmopolitan influences. But only after his death, and after Japan opened up, would his own papers float beyond the archipelago.

The French went wild. A critic at the fair singled out Hokusai as “the freest and most sincere of the Japanese masters.”

What these young moderns loved were the prints: their flat spaces, their simplified lines, their quotidian subject matter.

Hokusai’s example would soon influence the work of Paris’s modern artists.

These Parisians understood the prints they were looking at only in part. They made foolish, patronizing generalizations.

(Van Gogh, who painted these branches: “Isn’t it a true religion that these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?”)

Like most fantasies, “Japonisme” said more about the fantasizer than the fantasized. These Parisians, defeated in war and rocketing through industrialization, saw themselves in landscapes that were both ageless and adrift. And Hokusai, who’d already metabolized Western technique into his images of Japan, was the perfect vessel for their dreaming.

In the century to come, Japanese museums and corporations would become major buyers of French painting.

And in that light they would also elevate Hokusai into the highest exemplar of Japanese high art. A whole museum in Tokyo is devoted to his work alone.

By the turn of the millennium, Hokusai was no longer an exotic import to Western image-making, but a global master. In 1993, the photographer Jeff Wall completed “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai),” shot at a cranberry farm in British Columbia.

It’s one of this great Canadian photographer’s most complex images, and channels Hokusai in a totally different way to the Japonistes of modern Paris.

He has turned Hokusai’s porter into a businessman, who’s lost his trilby in the breeze.

The woman in the kimono here wears a pantsuit, and her papers fly out of a red folder, over the dike and the river.

And where Fuji once loomed, we see the treeline of suburban Vancouver.

The photograph does not capture a single moment. It’s a composition of more than one hundred exposures, joined as cunningly as the woodblocks in Hokusai’s printer’s studio.

Here we have a Canadian photographer nourished by French modern art, which was nourished by Japanese printmaking, which was nourished by Dutch book illustration and Chinese painting. The wind has blown from the printing house to the darkroom, across the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Hokusai already knew, in 1830, how quickly and thoroughly an image’s meaning can change. It’s already there in the picture of Ejiri.

The mountain rises against a largely empty sky. Against all the road’s activity — the wind, the dashed marsh grass, the color — Fuji is just a single, calligraphic stroke: swoop up, slash right, swoop down.

An ordinary artist would picture Fuji as a vision of beauty, a symbol of permanence. But Hokusai, the sharpest of ironists, does the opposite.

In this “view” of Fuji, the wind is so strong and sudden that it has washed the mountain away. It’s as if Fuji, when these storm-struck travelers can’t see it, recedes from our view as well.

Here, in a crummy little marsh under Fuji, Hokusai gave us a vision of culture in constant motion.

Because art’s meaning lies not only in what it looks like, but in how it circulates. And if you can’t fully control circulation, you can’t fully control meaning either. Least of all today, when digital images blow every which way.

You hold on to what you can in this explosion of images. But the mountain fades in the distance, and the papers end up in the air.

Images: “Ejiri in Suruga Province” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Sazai Hall at the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Tatekawa in Honjō” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Japanese Pavilion at the 1867 Paris World Exposition; “Yoshida on the Tōkaidō,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Woman Bathing,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Dancers Practicing at the Barre,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Public Gardens”; “Almond Blossom,” Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; “In the Battle of the Yellow Sea a Sailor onboard Our Japanese Warship Matsushima, on the Verge of Dying, Asked Whether or Not the Enemy Ship Had Been Destroyed,” via The Smithsonian; “Illustration of the Arrival of the Emperor at Shinbashi Station Following a Victory,” via The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai),” via Tate Museum.

Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli, Josephine Sedgwick, Laura O’Neill and Amanda Webster.