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HOKUSAI'S GREAT WAVE: Biography of a Global Icon. By Christine M.E. Guth. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. xv, 256 pp. (Illustrations.) US$20.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3960-4.
Christine Guth's study of the print officially titled "Under the Wave off Kanagawa," or Kanagawa oki no namiura, now commonly known as "The Great Wave," explores how this image travelled in time and space from 1831, Edo, Japan, to so many parts of the world, being reconfigured and reworked by artists all over the world in so many media. So what can this example teach us about the process of global cultural socialization?
Drawing on art history and the history of design, anthropology, sociology, and media studies, Guth answers questions, such as what defines an icon and what does globalization mean, while also exploring the biography of the print and how it first travelled on the waves of Japonisme, and later became the eye-catcher in publications and exhibition catalogues on Hokusai-who happened to be the designer of the original print-and again, more recently in national antagonism, as well as in media such as manga, anime, and the Internet. It may be added here that the first Japanese monograph on Katsushika Hokusai (Iijima Kyoshin, Katsushika Hokusai den, 2 vols., Tokyo: Hosukaku, 1893) makes no mention of The Wave, whereas the first Western monograph study of the artist (Edmond de Goncourt, Hokousaï, Paris, 1896) that mostly describes prints in just one or two lines, devotes ten lines to The Wave (166, cited by Guth on 81f.), as it also does for South Wind at Clear Dawn from the same series of prints (163f.)...