The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Katsushika Hokusai · Gaifū kaisei, Fine Wind, Clear Morning, known in English as Red Fuji · a colour woodblock print, nishiki-e, ink and colour on paper · horizontal ōban · one design of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji · published in Edo by Nishimuraya Yohachi, the firm of Eijudō, about 1830 to 1832 · the unit scored: the design as printed in its early impressions from the original blocks, drawing, cutting and printing together; later impressions, recuttings and reproductions are reach, not the work
Mode
Landscape print reduced to its subject: the famous mountain of a series of views, with every human element taken out
Mythos
The world mountain, the sacred peak that joins earth to heaven, carried by the subject and raised by isolation into an icon of itself
Phase
One morning, in the hour when the cone turns red in the first light; designed about 1830 to 1832, when the maker was about seventy
Presentation
Colour woodblock print, horizontal ōban, a key block and colour blocks under hand-graded colour; the design judged as the early impressions carry it
Register
Calm, clear and still: one sustained elevation, held at a single pitch
Scale
One mountain larger than its frame, on a sheet that can be held in two hands
Governing Proposition
A single mountain fills a sheet of paper, its summit right of centre and its long slope running out through the left edge, coloured red against a blue sky crossed by rows of small clouds, with a band of dark dots at its foot and a few streaks of snow below the summit. There is no person, no building, no boat and no road. The wager of the print is that a cheap colour woodblock of four or five areas of colour, in a commercial series built around people living below the mountain, can take every person out and leave the mountain as an event of one morning, and that the most permanent thing in the land can be shown as a light that will change within minutes.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The sheet is a horizontal ōban, a colour woodblock print in ink and colour on paper, and it holds one mountain. The summit sits right of centre, broad and nearly flat at the top. The long slope to the left runs down across the sheet and out through its left edge, so that the mountain is wider than the paper; the right slope falls more steeply toward the other edge. The cone fills most of the height of the sheet. Below the summit a few streaks of snow lie in the gullies. Across the foot runs a band of conifers, drawn as a field of dark dots. The sky is blue, crossed by rows of small clouds, the kind called iwashi-gumo, a mackerel sky. At the upper left are the cartouches. That is the whole of it: about four or five areas of colour, sky, cloud, cone, forest and snow.
The title in the cartouche is certain: Gaifū kaisei, which the desk gives as “fine wind, clear morning”, set beside the title of the series. The name by which the sheet is known in English, Red Fuji, is not on it. The title names the weather and the hour, not the place: a wind that clears the air, and a morning without haze. The mountain is not named in the title because the series is named for it. What the title asks the viewer to see is not Fuji as such but Fuji at one moment, with the air cleared and the light low.
What is not on the sheet matters as much. There is no human figure, no building, no boat and no road. The series to which the sheet belongs takes for its subject the mountain seen from the lives of people below it: from roads and fields, from the water, from behind the work of the people who live there. This sheet takes the people out. Nothing measures the mountain but the dots of the forest and the size of the clouds; nothing stands between it and the viewer. The work scored is that design as the early impressions carry it, printed from the original blocks in the first campaign of printing, and the cutting and printing, by hands not named on the sheet, are part of it.
Movement II
Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 and died in 1849, and he was about seventy when the series was begun. Fugaku sanjūrokkei, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was published in Edo by Nishimuraya Yohachi, whose firm was Eijudō, from about 1830, and it grew beyond its title to forty-six designs. It was a commercial venture: a publisher’s capital and an old artist’s living placed on a kind of print that had no proven market. The series sold, and the publisher extended it.
What it inherited was double. In the woodblock print of the city, the ukiyo-e, the subjects that sold were actors and courtesans, and landscape came as the picture of famous places, background to travel and to figures. In painting, Fuji was an emblem of the Kanō and literati schools, set at a distance as a white cone above mist. The series made landscape the principal subject of a commercial set of prints, carried it in a new imported blue, and absorbed into other designs a perspective learned from Western pictures. Its best-known design, The Great Wave, sets the mountain behind a sea with men at work beneath it.
This sheet goes to the other extreme. The mountain is brought close and cropped by the frame, coloured red rather than white, and stripped of every figure. Of a series whose argument is Fuji seen from human life, it is the sheet that drops human life and keeps the constant. That is the swerve it carries on its own account, and the reason it is the series’ purest statement. The larger risk, the bet on landscape and the blue, was taken by the series as a whole and paid off there, which is why the turn here is credited high but not at the top. The Great Wave (8.9), from the same series, publisher, format and years, holds men, sea and mountain under one law; this sheet removes the men and the rhyme and keeps the mountain.
Movement III
The design is reduced, and each of its few parts does work that is not obvious. The clouds are the fine wind of the title, the weather that has cleared the air, and they are drawn as rows of small repeated forms that recede by size toward the horizon, so that the sky has depth and the cone against it is vast. The forest at the foot is a band of dots, and the dots are the only measure of scale on the sheet: a forest that reads as texture is a forest far below. The snow in the gullies is the only sign of height, a mountain tall enough to hold snow in the warm months. The slope that runs out through the left edge is a mountain larger than the sheet that holds it, and shortening it would bring the mountain back inside a frame it exceeds.
Test it by subtraction and almost nothing gives. Take away the clouds and the cone loses its sky and its size; take away the forest and it loses its base; take away the snow and it loses its height and its season; pull the slope back inside the frame and it loses its scale. What yields is the furniture of the format, the cartouches and the signature, which the publisher’s series required and the design accepts rather than needs. A minimal design whose parts were decorative would pass the test only because there was little to test; this one passes because each of its parts is a measure.
The parts are also one rule. The snow is a mark repeated and placed, pale strokes down; the forest is a mark repeated and placed, dark dots across; the clouds are a third version, small arcs in rows. Colour obeys one law with them: every area flat or graded, none modelled. The design holds without contradiction anywhere. Its range is narrow, one subject, one hour, one register, four or five areas of colour, and the law is easy to keep across so small a span; the coherence is complete and the span it governs is small. What the sheet holds is the natural order in rock, forest and weather, time in the hour, and the sacred in the mountain itself, all in one form; what it omits, by design, is everything human.
Movement IV
The blue of the sky is Prussian blue, known in the Edo trade as bero-ai, an imported pigment, and the series is among the first in the print to use it at scale. The sky of this sheet is printed in it, flat and graded. Against it the cone is warm, red or brown according to the impression, with the snow left pale in the gullies. The colour on the sky and the cone is graded by bokashi, the colour wiped on the block by hand before each pull, so no two early impressions are identical, and the finest part of the making varies from sheet to sheet. Accounts of the early palette differ, and the desk leans on no single colour reading; what is plain is that the later impressions are darker and redder than the early ones.
The medium is collaborative and is credited whole. Hokusai drew the design; a carver cut the key block and the colour blocks; a printer pulled each impression in register, block by block, grading the colour by hand. The carver and the printer are not named. The drawing is exact where it must be: the slope in one long line, the cone’s profile, the few cuts that set the snow, the dots that become a forest at reading distance. The command is load-bearing, since the image is nothing but its making, and it is narrow, a few shapes and a few colours.
The form is the instrument of what the sheet knows. The woodblock gives the mountain as flat colour meeting at edges, with graded colour for light, and it makes clouds and forest a pattern of repeated marks whose repetition gives the cone its size; painted in oil, the same design would become a landscape and lose the emblem’s clarity. As a drawing in colour much of it would survive, which is what holds the form a step from the top. And the print is a multiple, sold cheaply in Edo in quantity. The sacred mountain that pilgrims climbed in the summer season, in the hands of anyone who would buy a sheet of paper, is part of the form: the pilgrim’s mountain made a household image.
Movement V
The red is the sheet’s meaning. A mountain is the most permanent thing in a landscape, and in Edo Fuji was a sacred one, climbed by the confraternities of the Fuji-kō and repeated by painters as a fixed emblem. This sheet shows it in a colour no permanent mountain has for more than a few minutes: the colour of one hour, one season and one wind. The season is usually read as late summer or early autumn, at dawn, but the month and the place from which the mountain was seen are unrecorded and argued. The disclosure holds without them: the permanent is known only in the transient. A second disclosure is quieter. With the pilgrims gone, what is holy in the mountain is the mountain. Most of what the sheet gives is a state, the clarity and stillness of a clear morning, and the state is rendered exactly; the meaning it states is one, and it holds.
The design has outlived everything that made it. It survives whole in many impressions held across Japan, Europe and North America, and as a multiple it has a survival no unique object has: no single loss takes the work. It has been collected in Japan from the first and in Europe from the 1860s, and reproduced without end. The cost falls on the early state, which is the unit: paper and some of the colour are fugitive, the early sheets are fewer, many are faded, and they are shown rarely and for short periods. Later impressions, darker and redder, are what most people have seen. The design is not touched by that; the colour as first printed is.
The reach came at once at home, where the landscape print became a principal genre: Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō followed within a few years, and later his own views of Fuji. From the 1860s the series travelled with the Japanese print into Europe, among the sheets most collected and copied; in 1902 Henri Rivière took its title outright for thirty-six views of the Eiffel Tower. Much of that reach is the series’ and The Great Wave’s. What belongs to this sheet is the type of the single mountain set alone, and the image of Japan itself. About 195 years on, a cheap print of four or five colours still shows the mountain larger than the paper, red for a moment, under a fine wind, with no one there.
Act III · The Twelve
Tested by subtraction, element by element. The cone cannot go: it is the picture. The snow below the summit cannot go: it is the height, a mountain tall enough to hold snow in the warm months, and it is the season. The clouds cannot go: they are the fine wind of the title, the weather that clears the air, and their small repeated forms make the cone read as vast. The band of dots at the foot cannot go: it gives the mountain a base and the eye its one measure of size. The slope cannot be shortened without bringing the mountain back inside a frame it exceeds. What yields is the series’ furniture, cartouches and signature. Held below the top because a design so reduced leaves little to test.
Score: 9.0 / 10
What the image discloses can be stated, and it holds: the permanent is known only in the transient. The mountain that pilgrims climbed and painters repeated as a fixed emblem is shown as the event of one morning, its colour given by an hour, a season and a wind, so that the most stable thing in the land is made of a light that will be gone within minutes. A second claim, lighter: the sacred mountain is seen without its worshippers, so what is holy in it is the thing itself. Held well below the gate because most of what the sheet gives is a state, the clarity and stillness of a clear dawn, and a state ranks below a meaning. Water Lilies (7.9) is held in the same place for the same reason.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The elevation is grandeur, and it is high. A mountain larger than its frame, set against a sky that recedes in rows of cloud, on a sheet that can be held in two hands: the print makes the vast present at the scale of a page, and the effect does not wear with familiarity. The red is the summit of it, the cone lit as if from within against a cold blue. It is one height, and it is the whole sheet: one image, one moment, one register of calm, so frequency is not what the axis can find here. Water Lilies (9.0) and The Starry Night (9.2), which rise again across a room or a sky, stand above it. The height depends in part on the early colour, which varies from sheet to sheet.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The archetype is the world mountain, the sacred peak that joins earth to heaven, and in Edo the cult around it was living: the Fuji confraternities, the Fuji-kō, and the pilgrim climbs of the summer season. Here the archetype is load-bearing in a strict sense, since there is nothing else in the picture: the mountain is not a background to a story but the whole subject, raised to an icon of itself. The particular holds: a real mountain, a real weather, the forest at its foot. Held below the gate because the myth is the mountain’s, inherited with the subject, and the print builds it only by isolation, constructing no structure of its own to carry it. Isolation is a real construction, which is why the figure is not lower.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is double. In ukiyo-e, landscape was secondary to actors and courtesans, carried by pictures of famous places as background to travel and figures. In painting, Fuji was an emblem of the Kanō and literati traditions, painted at a distance as a white cone over mist. The departure: a commercial series built on landscape as its principal subject, in a new imported blue; and in this sheet the extreme of it, the mountain brought close, cropped by the frame, coloured red, with every figure taken out. Of a series whose argument is Fuji seen from human life, this is the sheet that drops human life. The stake was a publisher’s venture on an unproven genre by an artist of seventy. Held below the top because the risk was paid in the series, and the series sold.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The print knows the mountain as flat areas of colour meeting at edges, with the graded colour of bokashi standing for light; in oil the same design becomes a painted landscape and loses the emblem’s clarity. The woodblock makes the clouds and the forest a pattern of repeated marks, and the repetition is what gives the cone its size. The print is a multiple, sold cheaply in Edo, and the sacred mountain in the hands of anyone who would buy it is part of what the work is: the pilgrim’s mountain made a household image. Held a step below the top because the design’s knowledge is partly separable from its medium: as a drawing in colour, much of it would survive.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: about 195 years, and sustained attention, much of it to the series and to the printing. The open questions are real but few. Which impressions are early, and what was the intended red? Where was the mountain seen from, and in which month? Is the red the dawn’s, or the season’s colour of the volcanic rock? How far is the design a meditation on the series’ own constant, the one view without a viewer? These are questions of state, place and reading, and they return to a small apparatus. The print yields on return chiefly as an object of contemplation, which is a real kind of depth but a narrow one. Held well below The Starry Night (9.0) and Las Meninas (9.5), where questions of meaning have run for a century.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed within its own field, the Japanese woodblock print and painting of the 1830s; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with its series, the reorganisation of the commercial print around landscape, and in this sheet the reduction of a landscape to one form and two or three colours, a mountain as a pure shape. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the series and to The Great Wave, not to this sheet, though it is the series’ purest statement and the type of the single mountain set alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the landscape print a principal genre at once, with Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō within a few years and his own Fuji series later; Japonisme in Europe from the 1860s; Rivière’s Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower in 1902; the emblem of Japan.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The design survives whole, in many impressions across the world, and a multiple has a survival no unique object has, since no single loss takes the work. Its presence is as wide as any print’s: collected in Japan and, from the 1860s, in Europe, and reproduced without end; fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. The fabric is paper and colour, some of it fugitive. The early state, which is the unit, survives in fewer sheets, many faded, and is shown rarely for light, and later impressions, darker and redder, stand between the public and the early colour. That is a charge on what most viewers see, not on the design, and it holds the figure a tenth below the widest step.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the colour woodblock, in design, cutting and printing together. The design: the slope drawn in one long line, the cone’s profile exact, the snow set down the gullies in a few cuts, the forest as a texture of dots that becomes a forest at reading distance, the clouds in rows that recede by size. The cutting and printing, credited to the work: several blocks in register, colour graded by hand in the sky and on the cone, Prussian blue held flat and graded. The image is its making, which is what the highest marks ask. Held a tenth below The Starry Night and Broadway Boogie Woogie (9.0 each) because the range of command is narrow, a few shapes and a few colours, and the finest part of the making, the early colour, varies by hand from sheet to sheet.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the snow below the summit and the forest at the foot: they obey one law, a mark repeated and placed, pale strokes down and dark dots across, and the clouds are a third version of the same rule. Colour obeys one law too: every area flat or graded, none modelled. The design holds without contradiction anywhere. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one subject, one hour, one register, four or five areas of colour. Coherence over so small a span is easy to keep, and the figure sits below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.9), which holds a whole city’s movement under one law.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in rock, forest and weather; time, in the hour and the season; and the sacred, in the mountain as an object of pilgrimage, implied rather than shown. They are integrated, one form carrying all three. Consciousness is present only as the viewer’s own. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, nearly everything the axis lists: no person, no family, no labour, no state and no history, all of which the rest of the series gives and this sheet removes. Its sister sheet, The Great Wave, holds the rowers’ labour and endurance and stands a full point higher here. One mountain, one morning and one sheet set the limit, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Inevitable at 9.0, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.9 and The Sublime at 8.8. A design that survives whole in many impressions because no one sheet carries it; a reduction in which every remaining part is a measure of the mountain; a form whose repeated marks give the cone its size and whose cheapness put the sacred mountain in the household; a making that is nothing but the image; and a grandeur that does not wear, a mountain larger than its frame on a page held in two hands.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: the natural order, time and the sacred are held in one form, and the person, the family, labour, the state and history, all of which the rest of the series gives, are taken out; one mountain, one morning and one sheet set the limit, and the figure describes the form. Above it, The Unconcealment at 7.8, The Bottomless Well at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3: the disclosure is one stated meaning inside a rendered state, the open questions are of state and place more than of meaning, and the myth is the mountain’s, raised by isolation rather than built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.8 falls short by seven tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 by two. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. The twelve sum to 101.2, an average of 8.43 that displays 8.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the design, of how such prints were made and of the history of the series. No impression, image or written source was consulted, and no particular early impression was examined; where a judgment rests on the colour of the early state, it is held with a margin. The work scored is the design as printed in its early impressions: Hokusai’s drawing, the cutting of the key block and the colour blocks, and the printing from the original blocks in the first campaign, about 1830 to 1832. The early impressions are the witnesses to that design; a later or faded impression is a worse witness, not a different work. Command of the medium is judged on design, cutting and printing together; the carver and the printer are unnamed, and their work is credited or charged to the work, not to Hokusai. The fading of the early colour, the darker and redder later printings and the dispersal of the sheets are weighed only as facts of survival. Not in the unit: the other designs of the series, The Great Wave among them, which are context for the undertaking and its reach; later impressions from worn or recut blocks; any single surviving sheet as a separate object; and the Meiji and modern recuttings and reproductions, which are reach, not the work. Only the title in the cartouche is given in Japanese, romanised; the English of it is the desk’s own. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the dimensions of the sheet, the form of the signature this design carries, the exact palette of the early state, the place from which the mountain was seen and the month, the size of the edition, the names of the carver and the printer, the price at which the sheet was sold, a reading of the mountain’s name as deathless, the count of the series’ designs without figures, and which public collections hold early impressions.