Boston e Bologna they are together for the exhibition of about 250 works for the first time in Italy that give life to the exhibition Hokusai hiroshige. Beyond the wave. Masterpieces twigs Boston Museum of Finish Arts.
The project is divided into six thematic sections and was curated by Rossella Menegazzo together with Sarah E. Thompson. The exhibition is a MondoMostre Skira production with Ales SpA Arte Lavoro e Servizi in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, promoted by the Common di Bologna | Istituzione Bologna Musei and sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency, the Japanese Embassy in Italy and the University of Milan.
The works come from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and will be kept at the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna from 12 October 2018 until 3 March 2019. On display will be the two greatest masters of the "Floating World": Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 1858). The exhibition is intended as a continuation of the initiatives launched in 2016 for the 150th anniversary of Italy-Japan bilateral relations
The XNUMXs marked the apex of ukiyoe production, a genre of Japanese art print on paper, impressed with woodblocks and known as “pictures of the floating world”. In that period, the most important woodcut series were created by the masters who confirmed themselves as the greatest names in Japanese art in the West, among which Hokusai and a few years later Hiroshige stood out.
Hokusai is an artist with an out-of-the-ordinary personality and although well conveying with strength, drama and conciseness together the places and faces, as well as the character and beliefs of the society of his time. He is considered one of the most refined representatives of the ukiyoe pictorial trend: among the most successful series of the Thirties we must certainly mention those dedicated to the famous waterfalls and bridges of Japan, even if it was with the Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji that Hokusai established himself on the market of landscape images as a great master. From then on, no artist of the Floating World has been able to express his art without confronting the works of Hokusai and in particular a print belonging to this series that has become an icon of Japanese art: The great wave off the coast of Kanagawa .
hiroshige about twenty years younger than Hokusai, became a household name in ukiyoe painting shortly after the release of Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji thanks to a series, in the same horizontal format, which illustrated the great road that connected Edo (the ancient name of Tokyo) to Kyoto. These were the Fifty-Three Post Stations of the Tōkaidō, known as "Hōeidō Tōkaidō" from the name of the publisher who launched Hiroshige to success. Since then the artist worked repeatedly on this same subject, producing dozens of different series until the XNUMXs. The quality of the illustrations of landscapes and views of Japan, the variety of seasonal and atmospheric elements - snow, rain, fog, moonlight - which Hiroshige was able to describe making them perceived in an almost sensorial way earned him the title of "master of rain and snow".
