The iconic Japanese print ‘The Great Wave’ (1830-1832) broke auction records when it sold for nearly $2.8 million on Tuesday March 21. Christie’s originally pegged the price estimate at $500,000 to $700,000. The final selling price of the print was higher than any Hokusai piece previously sold at auction.
Created by master printmaker Katsushika Hokusai and officially titled “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”, the print auctioned by Christie’s was one of the highest qualities. circulating versions not already acquired by a museum. This first impression featured sharp lines in the rolling waves and clear demarcations between sky and cloud formations.
“The recent record-breaking auction of ‘The Great Wave’ print is a rare and very early impression of the print, and one of the best prints of this print in existence,” Jacqueline Chao, Art Curator Asian at the Dallas Museum of Art, confirmed to Hyperallergic.
The artwork’s fame, immaculate condition and low estimate created the perfect storm for a record auction, potentially attracting a wider range of buyers. While experts estimate there may have been as many as 8,000, only 200 original prints remain, making the version up for auction at Christie’s all the more remarkable.
“With the ‘Great Wave’, new buyers arrive unexpectedly,” said Takaaki Murakami, head of Japanese and Korean art at Christie’s New York. the wall street journal. Some dealers wonder if the sale indicates increased interest from younger or newer collectors in well-known prints like Hokusai’s.
Hokusai’s well-regarded work has maintained its prominence over the centuries. Reproductions of “The Great Wave” have been printed on t-shirts, turned into iOS emojis (🌊), recreated as Lego sets, and featured on the cover of the 2022 novel Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. During his lifetime, Claude Monet acquired 23 prints and posted several of them on the walls of his house in Giverny. Some works inspired by Hokusai’s wave include Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889), Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” (1963), and Peter Soriano’s “Untitled (Wave)” (2005/2006); these last two will be part of the next exhibition Hokusai: inspiration and influence at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, which is scheduled to open March 26. In 2020, manga artist Araki Hirohiko created the attach “The Sky Above the Great Wave off the Kanagawa Coast”, which features the wave, for the Paralympics in Tokyo.
This piece was the first impression in the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, a study of the mountain and active volcano of Japan. Created during the Edo period (1603–1867) in the history of Japan using a style of woodblock printing called Ukiyo-e, this typically inexpensive print was designed for mass production and would have cost the same as a typically inexpensive meal like a bowl of noodle soup. While popular decorations, woodblock prints like Hokusai’s were not considered fine art in their time. Yet “The Great Wave” stood out when Hokusai first printed the artwork for its use of Prussian blue, a new synthetic dye imported from China and the Netherlands that resisted fading, unlike with indigo or dayflower blues. The entire Fuji series was a hit at the time, expanding the subjects of the genre to include landscapes.
In the print, rowers battle monumental waves threatening to crash as snow-capped Mount Fuji looms in the distance. Sarah Thompson, curator of the Hokusai exhibition at MFA Boston, said Hyperallergic that the wave can symbolize the dichotomy of beauty and terror in nature or serve as a metaphor for overwhelming emotion while the mountain, a sacred place in Japanese culture, could mean hope. Thompson surmises that the print’s strong narrative component continues to make “The Great Wave” so popular.
“Will these three little boats make it home safe and sound, or are they doomed? You can be optimistic or pessimistic about it; personally, I think they’ll be fine,” she said.
