Pod Insights Stories of Art Katsushika Hokusai: The Man Behind the Wave (Part 1) About this episode It’s one of the most recognisable images in all of art history, but who was the artist behind The Great Wave? And how did the military dictatorship of the Tokugawa shogunate create the conditions for his art to flourish? Join Alastair and James as they travel to Edo era Japan to explore the truly extraordinary life and work of Katsushika Hokusai.
If you want to see the artworks being discussed in this podcast, please switch to video in your podcast app at any time.
Artworks in this episode include:
Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831
Keisai Eisen, Portrait of Katsushika Hokusai, before 1848
Hokusai, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, 1814
Hokusai, Manga, 1814-19
To see images of the artworks in this episode go to heni.com/storiesofart or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks
Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox
Additional Research: Catherine Ingram
Producer and Editor: Ben Harding
Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 James Fox? Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.
0:04 Alastair Sooke? And I'm Alistair Sook.
0:09 James Fox? A group of fishermen is heading home after a long shift on the water. The sea is cold, the sky grey. As they row their way south, past the silhouette of a distant mountain, the wind picks up. Suddenly, a giant frothing wave rises up behind them and breaks over their heads. The men fall to their stomachs, grabbing their oars, clinging to their skiffs. Will they survive? We will never know. That was a description of the Great Wave, one of the most famous images, not just in Japanese art, but in world culture. You may have a Great Wave notepad, a Great Wave t-shirt, you might even make regular use of a Great Wave emoji.
0:52 James Fox? But while most of us are deeply familiar with this household image, hardly anyone knows anything about the man who made it. Until now. Because in this episode, Alistair, we're going to talk about the remarkable life of Katsushika Hokusai. Alistair, are you a Hokusai fan?
1:08 Alastair Sooke? I'm a huge Hokusai fan, James, and I'm really excited about this. This was your idea to this week concentrate on Hokusai, and it's a brilliant one.
1:19 Alastair Sooke? What an amazing life story. Prolific artist, probably the most famous artist in Japanese art. And this is maybe slightly biased, coming at it from a Western-centric perspective. But in the 19th century, his art has such a profound influence on the development of modern Western art, and that's a fascinating story in itself.
1:38 James Fox? Absolutely. And it's funny, you know, although he's famous, Alistair, for just this one image, he was anything but a one-hit wonder. His life extended almost 90 years. He's said to have made something like 30,000 artworks in the course of his career. He makes pictures of Edo's floating world. He makes eye-opening erotica, which we should probably warn listeners and viewers about. He more or less invents manga. He's a pioneer of performance art. He is, in my view, Alistair, one of the all-time greats. And yet he lives and he dies in poverty and squalor. This then is the story of Katsushika Hokusai.
2:24 James Fox? I think it's really important with Hokusai to set the scene and to provide some context, because the world in which he lived, Alastair, is very different from the world in which we live. So, he lives in a period that's called Edo-era Japan. So this is a remarkable period in Japanese history, in which Japan, really from the early 1600s through to the 1860s, so a 250-plus-year period, is largely, not entirely, but largely cut off from the rest of the world. And it's ruled by this very strict hierarchical regime called the Tokugawa Shogunate.
3:00 Alastair Sooke? Which sounds, I mean, so this is a military regime, right?
3:04 James Fox? Yes.
3:04 Alastair Sooke? The people at the top, it's a sort of hereditary commander-in-chief military, essentially dictator?
3:09 James Fox? Yeah, there's an emperor at the top, who doesn't really have any real power. The real power is held by the shogun. And this shogunate, this particular regime, lasts for a very long period of time. It's very strict, so no Christianity is allowed, there's very little trading with the rest of the world, there's a very strict regime in terms of a hierarchy. You have the emperor, you have the shogun, you have the lords, you have the famous samurai warriors, then you have merchants and artisans and things like that underneath. So it's a very, very strict authoritarian regime, but it produces a period of unbelievable peace and stability. So while the rest of the world is fighting like cats in a sack, or is it rats in a sack? There is this unbelievable period of stability and prosperity in Japan, between
3:54 James Fox? the early 1600s and the late 1860s.
3:57 Alastair Sooke? So my recollection of this as well is that part of that prosperity is you see the rise of the city in Japan.
4:05 James Fox? Absolutely.
4:06 Alastair Sooke? And I think that's going to be an important part of the story we're telling today. You have these big civic centres, and Tokyo, modern Tokyo, or as it was called...
4:15 James Fox? Edo.
4:15 Alastair Sooke? Edo, had by the time that Hokusai was alive, a population of probably more than 1 million people.
4:22 James Fox? Yeah, it was probably the largest city in the world in Hokusai's lifetime. So more than a million people, larger than London, larger than Beijing. Yeah, I mean, this... Whole stability that I'm talking about produced unprecedented economic development. It led to these very large cities. It led to very high rates of literacy. And in my mind, Alistair, I know I'm partial. It led to, I think, one of the great civilizations, one of the great cultures the world has ever known. You've got the wood plot prints, we're going to talk about those. You've got Kabuki theatre, you've got the haikus, you've got unbelievable ceramics, unbelievable lacquerware, all emerging from this period of relative isolation. And you're right, the capital of this, of Japan itself is this enormous city called Edo, which is modern day Tokyo.
5:05 Alastair Sooke? And this is where Hokusai is born.
5:07 James Fox? This is where Hokusai is born, yeah. This is a population that's enormous. It's living in this great wooden metropolis that's constructed along a network of rivers and canals. And in some ways, his city is very modern. It's because it's because this stability has produced this very hedonistic society.
5:26 Alastair Sooke? Now, it's worth probably exploring that as a concept because part of the evolution of the city in Japan, as I understand it, is that you have a very stratified society.
5:36 James Fox? Yeah.
5:36 Alastair Sooke? But because you have peace and because you have prosperity, there are some classes of society, notably probably artisans and merchants, who start to become quite rich. And the people in charge understand that they need to allow these people, if there isn't going to be some social revolution, they need to have fun. They need to have a sort of opportunity to, what, spend the cash that they've earned and enjoy themselves.
6:00 James Fox? Yes, and that's why I think the city is quite modern in a way because it's a city that's built around consumers, a city built around the service sector, it's a city built around pleasure. So there are theatres, there are brothels, my god, there are lots of brothels. There are restaurants, there are bookshops, there are libraries, there is all kinds of fun that is at people's disposal. And this is the city that Hokusai is born into. So he's born the end of October seventeen sixty. It's quite difficult to to translate these dates to Western dates, but it's pretty much end of October seventeen sixty. He's born. In a working class suburb of Edo.
6:42 James Fox? That's sometimes called Katsushika, which is why we often call him Katsushika Hokusai.
6:47 Alastair Sooke? I did not know that, interesting.
6:48 James Fox? It's not really his name, it's like Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci wasn't his name, it was the place he came from.
6:53 Alastair Sooke? And can we, just on the names, I mean whilst we're doing that.
6:56 James Fox? Oh god.
6:56 Alastair Sooke? I mean, this is a can of worms. But Hokusai isn't his name either, that is an artist's name that he adopts. And he, Hokusai, that's the sort of name by which most people remember him today. And it's his sort of most famous artist name. But during his long life, he had loads of these artist's names. And I'm sure we'll get into some of those transitions and evolutions. But they're very telling about his state of mind. I think the only point I wanted to make now is that just as we learn that he moved house constantly. He changes his artist's name a lot. And I think it's really symptomatic of something about his spirit, which we can mesh probably on to his artistic
7:37 Alastair Sooke? identity and soul, because he's ceaselessly restless and creative. And constantly seemingly moving forwards on to the next thing.
7:47 James Fox? I think that's absolutely central to understanding Hokusai. I think he moves house 93 times. He is constantly changing, he is restless, he is constantly trying new things. I think that's the source of his power, actually. I think if he were alive today, he would definitely have an ADHD diagnosis. But that's the source of his genius, that he's never standing still, he's always experimenting. And indeed, his first name, when he's born in October 1760, is Tokitaro, which means firstborn son. So he was the firstborn son of a working class family.
8:21 Alastair Sooke? And what do we know about the family?
8:22 James Fox? Nothing, really nothing, because at the age of three, he was adopted, he was moved, he moved families. I mean, we've already mentioned Leonardo, Leonardo was, you know, an illegitimate boy, he's born out of wedlock. This is the same with Hokusai, we think. So age three, he gets removed from his biological family and given a bit of a social upgrade, moved to another family.
8:48 James Fox? We should probably say that this process of adoption was relatively common at this time in Japan. So children were constantly moving families.
8:59 Alastair Sooke? Is it sort of seen for a family as a way of social advancing, preferment? If you can get a place, it's worth saying goodbye. And also presumably the family could still, would still have seen Hokusai, do we think?
9:11 James Fox? We don't know, but I presume so. But yes, that's one of the reasons why people would be adopted. It was a way of getting a social upgrade for your child. But there were other reasons as well. If you, for instance, were an artisan, you're running a workshop and you don't have any sons, you've only got daughters, you can recruit a son to take on the workshop. If you are elderly and you don't have any children at all and you need some help being looked after, you can recruit an adult child who will look after you as you become more and more infirm.
9:39 Alastair Sooke? So this is sort of what happens here because the adopted father is a craftsman.
9:44 James Fox? He is a craftsman, yeah. So this is the Nakajima-Issei family and they are, they are pretty respectable artisans. They are mirror makers for the shogun himself. So they have a sort of royal appointment in a way that Smyderson's produces notepads for the royal household.
10:01 Alastair Sooke? Got it.
10:02 James Fox? So the Nakajima family produced mirrors for the shogun. Mirrors were very different back then, they didn't have glass mirrors.
10:08 Alastair Sooke? So what are they made of?
10:09 James Fox? They're made of bronze. So they did have some glass in Japan at the time, but they didn't, they didn't have the capacity to make mirrored glass. And so they were made from bronze and then you'd have to polish this bronze interminably to make it reflective.
10:22 Alastair Sooke? Are we imagining that young Hokusai would be put to task doing that?
10:27 James Fox? I think it's, I think it's pretty likely that as a young boy, four, five, six years old, he'd be there polishing this bronze for hours and hours and hours to make it reflective. And so you would suspect that he would then follow in his adoptive father's footsteps and become a mirror maker himself. But he doesn't. And at the age of 12, he takes on a very menial job. He's a delivery guy. He's a book delivery guy. Now, I think I mentioned at the start of this episode that
10:58 James Fox? Edo, Japan was a very literate society, far more literate than any country in the West. And Edo, the city itself, was just book obsessed. There were six, seven hundred lending libraries in the city. And Hokage gets this job working for one of them. So his job would have been, as a twelve-year-old boy, he would, in the morning, go to the shop, pack a backpack full of books, and then run through the street on his little spindly legs, from borrower to borrower, from back to the shop and then back out again. And this, I think, Alastair, would have been quite formative in his career, I think.
11:35 Alastair Sooke? Is it worth thinking about the sorts of books, what we mean by books at this moment in Japan? Because clearly there would have been the equivalents of, you know, the stories with, full of characters and they're sort of text-driven. It's novels.
11:48 James Fox? Lots of novels.
11:50 Alastair Sooke? But you also have, and this is really key in Japanese culture, you have essentially storybooks which are picture-driven. And so he, Hokage, as a young boy, he's coming into this climate of this, this very sophisticated, longstanding publishing world that you've described. But a huge part of that culture is that it's a space for visual artists to work commercially, to have a career, to produce the images which end up in these books.
12:19 James Fox? Absolutely. That's, that's an absolutely enormous part of an artist's life in Edo, Japan, is to produce illustrations for books. And I think this must have played a really important role in what he subsequently went on to do. I just have this feeling, I'm pretty certain this would have happened, that halfway through a shift, little Hokage would have found a quiet corner behind a, a building and opened up his backpack and taken out the books and looked at them furtively before returning to his shift. And I think it probably did kindle this lifelong love of books and book illustrations.
12:51 Alastair Sooke? It, it's quite tempting to imagine him as well. Possibly copying images that he loves. I mean, certainly you have this, we know from the way his career and his life goes later, that he is so prolific. His creativity is just so exuberant and fertile. It must be the case that as a young boy, in the way that you see children today who are very talented visually at art, they're always drawing. And he must have been doing that.
13:17 James Fox? We know this because he says in a famous quotation that he was drawing relentlessly from the age of six.
13:23 Alastair Sooke? Right.
13:23 James Fox? So he was already into it. And so the books were just adding fuel to the fire, I think, of his inspiration. And indeed, after two years as a delivery guy in Edo, he actually becomes part of the, I suppose, procedure of making these illustrations for books. He becomes an apprentice to a block cutter. So we've talked a little bit about the importance of illustration in books. The way it works is you had lots of people involved in the production of these illustrations. Most of the illustrations in books, in fact, all of them, were woodblock prints. And so a publisher would commission an artist or a designer to make a nice picture. A copy of that picture would then be sent to the block cutter.
14:07 James Fox? The block cutter would stick that piece of paper onto a piece of wood, normally cherry wood, because it had very fine grain, you could cut very detailed patterns. And then would cut through the drawing and create the design on the block. And then the block would be passed to the printer and the printer would print out the image.
14:25 Alastair Sooke? I mean, it's quite complicated what you're describing, but immediately to me, it resonates, I think it will resonate for many listeners and viewers, this idea that actually, this moment of fine art in Japan, it's hugely collaborative. So yes, Hokusai is a towering genius, but a lot of the images that we see and associate with him, we're going to talk later about the extraordinary paintings that he produces, particularly towards the end of his life. But these prints involve many different people. So it's quite possible that the subject matter or theme of a particular series might be, say, the publisher's idea, it's commercial interest, we think that this is going to really work. And then...
15:05 Alastair Sooke? Hokusai, as he will be later, he's creating that drawing, which mostly will be destroyed, won't it, in the course of transferring it to the block. But if you have to think about the tremendous skill that would have been required to carve the blocks, so that, and this is, I think, the trick, you have to, the block cutter has to try and replicate or create some sense of the mark-making, the spontaneity, the energy and spirit of that drawing that's going to be destroyed. And that can't get lost in translation, and that's a real skill. And then you have the printer, as you say, who then themselves bring various techniques and tricks to create various effects.
15:43 James Fox? Yeah, and I think this experience that Hokusai has as a block cutter must have also been formative, because I think this is the way you learn the limits and the possibilities of the medium. And I think that's why he goes on to become the greatest exponent of the woodblock print of perhaps all time, because he understands what can be done, how that medium can be stretched, what will work when cut into wood, and what won't work. And, but he doesn't last all that long. We've talked about his constant restless energy.
16:14 Alastair Sooke? Yes, he's already got it.
16:15 James Fox? He's already, yeah, so, you know, after four years of being apprentice to the woodblock cutter, he leaves. And age 18, he becomes apprentice to an artist who's called Katsukawa Shunsho. Katsukawa Shunsho is a, is a very respected artist who produces works that are often called, I'm sure you've heard this word before, ukioi.
16:39 Alastair Sooke? Mmm, well pronounced.
16:41 James Fox? Thank you very much, I was probably completely wrong.
16:42 Alastair Sooke? Let me just get that right, ukioi.
16:44 James Fox? Ukioi.
16:44 Alastair Sooke? Okay.
16:45 James Fox? Do you, have you heard that phrase before?
16:47 Alastair Sooke? Oh, I've heard that phrase. And ukioi, I mean, it's, it's such an alluring concept within the history of art. I think it means pictures, paintings of the so-called floating world.
17:00 James Fox? Very good translation there.
17:01 Alastair Sooke? Yeah, the floating world. I mean, you've already described all of these civic, urban entertainments that lots of people back in the day in Japan would have enjoyed. And quite often, that military dictatorship that's ruling society sank
17:15 Alastair Sooke? These things, but they were they were walled off, weren't they? There were specific districts of the various Japanese cities behind walls where people could go to enjoy themselves in these tea houses and the many brothels that you spoke about earlier, James. And over time, the pleasures, the activities, the various scenes and some of the celebrity figures that you might have encountered there that people would have known about, they start to be expressed and depicted by visual artists.
17:43 James Fox? Yeah.
17:43 Alastair Sooke? And these artists are creating and catering to this market, this appetite for imagery of this world, which is all about contemporary fashion, all about contemporary consumer society, if you like. And that's already exists. That's a tradition that's already there. And so I think it's the case that when Hokusai joins the studio, becomes a pupil of Katsumawa Shuncho, quite soon after that, you find him creating pictures of maybe Kabuki actors.
18:17 James Fox? Yeah.
18:18 Alastair Sooke? Maybe pictures of beautiful women, the kind of fashionistas you might encounter in the in the so-called floating world. And the floating world, just very briefly, it comes with these associations, doesn't it, of, I think you've already used the word hedonism or hedonistic. There's a sense originally that it was more of a Buddhist concept, this idea of the transitory fleeting nature of the world, which you could say is slightly pessimistic. But by the time that Hokusai is born, it's evolved and it's more about simple pleasure seeking and kind of life-affirming.
18:50 James Fox? I think what it comes to refer to is this almost Baudelairian notion of the city as a place of hedonism, of wandering.
18:58 Alastair Sooke? I mean, that's a brilliant analogy, and it's also particularly useful because later on it will become even more relevant. But when you say Baudelairian, what do you mean?
19:05 James Fox? Well, Baudelair was a French critic who described, was really writing about mid-century Paris and was talking about the city in which people were wandering through the streets, going to restaurants, going to nightclubs. There was a kind of sense of evening pleasures, wandering, you know, aimless decadence.
19:23 Alastair Sooke? I think the word was flaneur.
19:25 James Fox? Flaneur is the term he uses, but this is a concept at least that's being used in Japan long before Baudelaire comes along.
19:30 Alastair Sooke? So it's sort of the city as spectacle?
19:32 James Fox? It's the city as spectacle, and you're completely right. The images that come out of this, the ukio e, the e means the image of the floating world, are describing some of those pleasures that you can find as a middle-class flaneur in Edo. So Shunsho's studio specializes in two particular kinds of image. They produce images of courtesans, of beautiful women, beautifully called bijinga. And they also make images of kabuki stars. Kabuki is a very, very popular form of Japanese theatre in this period. It's kind of, it's very amusing, it's sort of, the closest thing in the UK would be pantomime, but it's an enormous cultural phenomenon in Japan then as now.
20:14 Alastair Sooke? It's very familiar to us that an actor would be a celebrity. Are we saying that the courtesans were also celebrities at their day?
20:21 James Fox? They were also massive celebrities in Edo. And kabuki stars are still enormous celebrities. I mean, I, when I went to do this series in Japan, we met a major kabuki star. I'd of course never heard of him, no one outside of Japan has heard of him. But in Japan, absolutely enormous. So these stars are very, very significant figures within Edo. And it's really important to say that the kind of images that Shunsho and his workshop were producing, they were mass culture. They were cheap prints, you know, they were the, you could buy them for the price of a bowl of noodles.
20:55 Alastair Sooke? I love this fact.
20:56 James Fox? Yeah, a couple of pounds.
20:58 Alastair Sooke? It's an extraordinary thing. I mean, the idea that, I mean, you mentioned at the top, the most famous print by Hokusai, which we'll come back to, the Great Wave, but probably what? That is being produced in maybe there are 5,000, 10,000 impressions of that which are created from the blocks, and those are being bought for that cheap, cheap, cheap price. I have no idea what they'd go for today. A hell of a lot more than, you know, the price of a cheap meal around the corner from where we're recording this in Soho.
21:22 James Fox? Absolutely, and people would only keep them for a bit. They might have them up on a wall or enjoy them for a few weeks or a few months, and then they'd throw them away and they'd replace them. The equivalent, Shunsho's work is the equivalent, if you like, of a teenager having A poster of Erling Haaland or Taylor Swift on their wall.
21:37 Alastair Sooke? You're doing them a disservice because, I mean, these are created by real commercial artists who, it's not just a photo. I mean, my daughter has many, many pictures of Taylor Swift on the wall. None of them quite have the beauty and dynamism, I would suggest. I put it to you, James, of the woodblock prints of 18th century Japan.
21:55 James Fox? They may not be as aesthetically refined, Alastair, but the purpose, their function was similar. The function was the same. It was the idea of just having a nice, cheap image that was giving you a bit of pleasure, that was expressing your particular taste at a given point in time, but they were ultimately ephemeral. And when you moved on and you picked up new interests, they disappeared. They came down off the wall and they went into the bin and they were replaced with the next person. So Hokusai works for quite a long period of time in Shunsho's workshop, but in 1793, and actually he takes up a different name at this point. So again, we've talked about Hokusai's many different names. He calls himself Shunro at this point. So after Shunsho, he becomes Shunro.
22:36 Alastair Sooke? So this is the name of another school or artist that he's taking on, is it?
22:40 James Fox? Exactly, after his master. So Hokusai, who's now known as Shunro, he works at Shunsho's workshop for a very long period of time. But in 1793, Shunsho dies and his leading disciple, whose name helpfully is Shunko. Shunko takes over and Shunko very quickly sacks Hokusai. Hokusai thrown out of the, we don't really know. He's thrown out of the workshop a year later in 1794. There may have been some kind of rivalry there. Possibly he was jealous of Hokusai.
23:16 Alastair Sooke? So could we imagine or extrapolate from this an occasionally fiery temperament?
23:21 James Fox? Possibly. I mean, he was, he was hard to wrangle Hokusai. And what scholars suspect is that ultimately what he was doing is he was breaking the rules of the workshop by experimenting with lots of different styles. So it had, there was a house style that was produced in this workshop. Hokusai was playing with other Japanese styles, was playing with Chinese styles. He was playing with Western styles because some Western images were beginning to sneak in to Japan at this time. And that may be the reason why Shunko said to him, you've got to go. This is a massive humiliation. It's a significant setback for him. Let's remember, he's not a Spring chicken any longer. He's 33 years old, 34 years old.
24:06 Alastair Sooke? And so far, he's just had a fairly middling career, right?
24:09 James Fox? Very middling.
24:10 Alastair Sooke? Probably still fairly impoverished. I mean, is he making much cash by this point?
24:13 James Fox? Never making much cash. I mean, the thing to say is that all these people working in the woodblock industry, it's the publishers who have all the money. They, there are no royalties paid, you know, an artist designer is paid a flat fee to make an image. It's a very small fee. He is impoverished basically throughout his life.
24:30 Alastair Sooke? As a journalist for a newspaper, it feels very familiar, James.
24:33 James Fox? It's one of the reasons why he has to move 93 times is that, you know, he cannot settle down. And so he's 34 years old, 1794, he's been thrown out of the workshop, major setback, no income. Most artists at this point are working in the context of a large studio. So he doesn't really have any professional future. And to make matters worse, Alastair, in that same year, his wife dies. And this leaves him a single parent with three children, a son and two daughters. Terrible situation. And some accounts, I don't know how reliable they are, but some accounts say he, he goes on to have a period of sort of dissolute existence, gambling, going to prostitutes and so on and so forth.
25:17 James Fox? He even apparently, one account says he ends up selling chili oil from a barrow in the street. That's the only way he can keep up, pay his bills. So it's a really, really bad period for him in 1794, 1795.
25:29 Alastair Sooke? I mean, it's just, it's slightly sad to reflect that this towering genius of world art never really quite made it in a financial sense in his lifetime.
25:39 James Fox? No, even at right at the end of his life, he still is living in poverty. It's partly that, you know, it's very difficult for artists to make money at that time. It's partly that he's very poor at managing his finances and he lives this very reckless, thoughtless, you know, life in some ways. But he's thrown, he suddenly finds himself mid 1790s on his own and he renames himself, of course he does. He renames himself Saudi.
26:07 Alastair Sooke? Yeah.
26:07 James Fox? And he embarks on a career as a freelance artist. And after the break, we will hear just how he gets on as a freelancer.
26:16 Alastair Sooke? If you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.
26:37 James Fox? Welcome back to Stories of Art. We're telling the story of the life and work of Katsushika Hokusai. We're in 1794, poor old Hokusai has just been sacked and is now trying to make his way as a freelance artist. We mentioned it before that he's got this restless creative energy. He's constantly looking and trying new things. And actually, in a way, being a freelance artist enables him, freed from the shackles of a particular workshop and a house style, to do his own thing. And so this is often called the sort of laboratory phase in Hokusai's career, when he just plays with loads of different kinds of stuff. He makes woodblock prints, as before, of courtesans and kabuki stars, but he also
27:21 James Fox? does these surimono, which are these privately commissioned, very beautiful prints. He does drawings, he starts to do some landscapes, he does a bit of everything. He does some erotica, which we may come to.
27:32 Alastair Sooke? I think we should, James.
27:34 James Fox? Shall we come to some erotica? Because I know, Alistair, you're a big fan of Hokusai's erotica.
27:37 Alastair Sooke? Oh, my God, James, please don't stitch me up. This is being recorded, you are aware of that. Let's just, before we move into this part of the conversation.
27:44 James Fox? Are you blushing, Alistair?
27:45 Alastair Sooke? It's very easy to smirk and snigger, but this is an important part of the story, and we do need to tell it. Professionally, it is our obligation, James, to tell this.
27:55 James Fox? Neither of us wanted to do this, Alistair.
27:57 Alastair Sooke? Of course not. But you are referring to this subgenre of these woodblock prints, which is known as shunga, meaning 'spring pictures'. And it just so happens, by chance, that a contemporary publisher, Taschen, sent me, because I'm an art critic and so on, I sometimes get these advanced copies of things, and they sent this lavish volume of Hokusai's complete erotica.
28:22 James Fox? You didn't request it?
28:23 Alastair Sooke? Complete shunga. And we won't get into that. And the complete erotica arrived on my, well, it had to be sort of biked over. It's big, okay? And what was fascinating going through this is, first of all, as works of art, the images inside are extraordinary. But we need to contextualise this because we, in a moment, we're going to talk about one of the most famous and bizarre and grotesque images that Hokusai ever made. But you need to contextualise it to really understand it. And the point about shunga is that very early in his career, within two or three years of being an artist, Hokusai is producing initially monochrome shunga, these spring pictures.
29:05 Alastair Sooke? And we've got to be honest, they are sexually totally explicit. They mostly depict, and this is true of the wider genre which many artists contributed to, they mostly depict heterosexual couples, but not exclusively. And I think a key point to make about them is that they rarely depict sexual violence. And instead, you often see a situation of mutual pleasure between men and women in which women's sexual pleasure is being championed, if you like, in a way that I think would be quite resonant with our values today. And the really key thing to get in your head about it is that whereas in the West at this
29:48 Alastair Sooke? time, and still to a degree now, judging by the way we've been, you know, ourselves, slightly tying ourselves up in knots to talk about this, this stuff might have been historically seen as an obscenity. In Japan, that's not quite the case.
30:02 James Fox? No, it's not remotely controversial, not remotely taboo. This is something, it's a very popular genre of image production. It's widely popular across society. Married couples would often buy some shunga after they got married. I mean, it was, it was a very big part of the market.
30:19 Alastair Sooke? Can I say very briefly, James, just because this is irresistible and we've spoken about the artists' names, clicking through this book, I discovered that one of the late examples of shunga that Hokusai creates is a volume called The Adonis Plant.
30:33 James Fox? I don't know that.
30:34 Alastair Sooke? Well.
30:35 James Fox? Tell me more.
30:36 Alastair Sooke? Yeah, well.
30:37 James Fox? You've obviously studied this very closely.
30:38 Alastair Sooke? The detail I liked about it is that.
30:43 Alastair Sooke? You have to understand, the shunga are, they're sort of tolerated. So they're not, they're not quite banned. Everyone knows that people like them and buy them. But at the same time, there are these sort of restrictions. They're slightly frowned upon by the authorities. Things change over the years, but in broad terms, that's the case. And as a result, publishers and artists don't quite put their real names to the shunga. But Hokusai, they come up with pseudonyms. Just to give you a flavour.
31:08 James Fox? Thank you.
31:09 Alastair Sooke? Yes, please. Hokusai's pseudonym for the Adonis plant was Insuité Jaco. Probably butchered the pronunciation. And a literal translation of that is lewd juices lady lover.
31:22 James Fox? Wow.
31:24 Alastair Sooke? Wow, indeed.
31:25 James Fox? That's something.
31:25 Alastair Sooke? But it suggests that there's an element of play and humour, which I think also comes into the shunga. Now, is there an image that, I mean, I've, I've referred to it already, but do we want to talk about one?
31:37 James Fox? I mean, there's one image that he is particularly famous for. And it's, he's famous for it because it is, it is so shocking in some ways, isn't it?
31:45 Alastair Sooke? It's quite, besides, it, it, it sticks in the mind.
31:47 James Fox? It's called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. And it depicts a young Japanese girl. She's probably a freediver. She's probably been diving for pearls or for shellfish. And she washes up on a beach, almost dead, actually, when this giant octopus emerges from the water. It's as big as her. And how do I, how do I describe this in a, in a, in a genteel way? He uses his suckers to revive her in a particular place. And she is enjoying being revived by this octopus. It's actually.
32:22 Alastair Sooke? You're being very coy, James. The octopus is performing oral sex upon this diver. I think we just need to spell that out.
32:28 James Fox? Thanks for doing that for me, Alistair. And, and there's.
32:30 Alastair Sooke? There's another octopus.
32:31 James Fox? There's a baby octopus, who actually is the big octopus's son, who's doing the same on other erogenous zones. And so it is, I mean, there's actually also a dialogue that goes with this, which is too crude even for me to read out. But I think it is important we mention this. We've said already how it is a very important part of visual culture at the time. But I think it's also important that it gives you a sense at this stage. Of the full scope of Hokusai's output, he was an image maker. He made all kinds of images. He made some very refined images. He said made some very crude images. So that distinction we have in the West between fine art and popular culture, it just doesn't make any sense when you're talking about someone like Hokusai, does it?
33:16 Alastair Sooke? It's much more porous. I sense, James, you're trying to interest away from this image, but I insist we analyse it further. It is, the reason I want to is because I think artistically, it has tremendous merits. It is an exception in Ishunga, having this kind of grotesque animal-human hybrid coupling going on, which perhaps is why it's so incredibly memorable. Other artists did depict scenes involving animals, but this one, I think the thing that's extraordinary about it is, let's just pretend the subject matter, which is, in a sense, complicated and sensitive, is very, very X-rated. If we just park that and think about it in visual terms, you have the clear contrast between the beautiful
34:01 Alastair Sooke? young woman and the monstrosity of the huge octopus, whose head is between her legs, and then the baby octopus who's up by her face. And you have, I think, very, very cleverly as a conceit, this idea of the octopus, who has so many tentacles and all of these suckers, it evokes that sense of touch. So in a sense, what Hokusai is doing here, because this woman with her head thrown back in ecstasy or being revived, you know, one of the tentacles is coiled around her left nipple, the baby octopus's beak is approaching her mouth,
34:41 Alastair Sooke? you have a real sense, I think, of, actually surprisingly, given the monstrosity, the sensitivity slash ferocity of lovemaking. This is a metaphor for human coupling, and it's hugely evocative in that sense. That's my case.
35:00 James Fox? I love how deeply you've thought about this image, Alastair. That's very impressive. But anyway, that just gives you a sense and gives listeners a sense, and they can look it up in more detail.
35:07 Alastair Sooke? Can just find final point on Shunga, final point on Shunga.
35:11 James Fox? Yes.
35:11 Alastair Sooke? I couldn't.
35:12 James Fox? You're a dog with a bone.
35:13 Alastair Sooke? Couldn't resist this. The the rather amazing scholar Andreas Marx, who was writing about it in this book that I received. He did refer, I mean, this is, it gives you a sense that these images really were used. So the earliest Shunga that Hokusai creates, the monochrome ones that predate the image that we've just described. They're very, very rare. And the reason they're so rare is because the surviving things are either damaged, incomplete, or generally in poor condition. And the word that this scholar Marx used to describe that poor condition, and I'm just going to leave it with you, was stained.
35:44 James Fox? Ah, right. Well, we will leave it at that point, I think.
35:48 Alastair Sooke? All right, fine, we've done Shunga.
35:49 James Fox? But I think it's also important to say that that the range of Hokusai's output at this point was so enormous and that he was even undertaking what might be called performance pieces.
36:03 Alastair Sooke? Right.
36:03 James Fox? And happenings. And I'd like to talk about that a little bit because I think we often think of performance art as something that's invented in the West in the second half of the 20th century. But Hokusai was doing these happenings in the early 1800s.
36:16 Alastair Sooke? Yep.
36:16 James Fox? The most famous example is he's at this Buddhist event somewhere in Japan, I can't remember exactly where. And he lays out this enormous sheet of paper on the ground, 200 plus meters squared, so the size of an enormous garden. And the crowd assembles. And then when the crowd is there, he gets this broom, a reed broom, and he dips it into a cask of ink. And then he just walks over the paper, brooming this ink all over the the the the surface. No one knows what he's doing, it's completely unclear to people. And it's only at the end of the process when he pulls the drawing up and suspends it on a scaffold that people reveal it's the most immaculate portrait of Daruma, who is the father of Zen Buddhism, and no one can believe it.
37:01 James Fox? He also works at a very small scale, so there's another story, again from the early 1800s. When he takes a grain of rice and he pulls a brush, this time very small, single hair, and starts drawing something on the grain of rice, no one can see what he's doing. And eventually, when he's completed, someone looks through a magnifying glass and they realise he has drawn the most perfect depiction of two swallows flying through the sky.
37:25 Alastair Sooke? So, so, sort of completely intimate, minuscule to the grandest stage. There's the, there's the autumn leaves.
37:31 James Fox? Oh, we must. Do you want to do the autumn leaves?
37:33 Alastair Sooke? I'd love to do the autumn leaves. If you, I mean, this is, this whole aspect of his career is, as you've said, it feels really contemporary, like unbelievably contemporary. The one that I have in mind makes me think, go back slightly into the 20th century and the big vogue of so-called action painting that emerges after the Second World War in America, people like Jackson Pollock.
37:56 James Fox? Good comparison, actually.
37:57 Alastair Sooke? And what Hokusai does, just keep that in mind, the idea of Jack the Drippers, he was quickly called, you know, creating these enormous, sort of splattered paintings. 1807, Hokusai is called before the Shogun.
38:09 James Fox? So the Shogun himself is now...
38:12 Alastair Sooke? So he's famous. Hokusai's famous, he's renowned, given all of this tricksy performance stuff. And he's told, you've got to come and demonstrate your work. And what he does here is there's, again, there's a sheet of paper and he paints just very simply a few lines of blue onto the paper. And presumably people are looking on thinking, what's he doing? What's going on here? And then suddenly, and this is the great reveal, he plucks out from a basket a live chicken, okay? And he dips the legs of the chicken in red ink and then puts it onto the paper. So it walks across and obviously leaves impressions on the paper on these blue marks. And then at the end, I don't actually know what happens to the chicken. Presumably the chicken's taken and put in the basket, but the chicken's out the picture.
38:55 James Fox? Eaten, perhaps.
38:56 Alastair Sooke? Eaten, maybe as a celebration.
38:57 James Fox? Maybe it escapes, who knows?
38:58 Alastair Sooke? But his sort of flourish at the end is, have a look at this image, picks it up, there it is, and the title he gives it is Autumn Leaves on the Tatsuta River. And you can imagine those chicken feet in red, like maple, like fallen red or tunnel leaves on the blue of, of the waves in the water. And it's just ingenious.
39:19 James Fox? It's so brilliant. Do we know if, what if the Shogun approved? He must have loved it, surely.
39:24 Alastair Sooke? Well, you'd have to be. A bit of a cold hearted bastard to reply to this, respond to that and say, not good enough, you know. I, I don't know, actually, what, do you, do you have, do we have a documentary evidence of the show?
39:34 James Fox? I don't know, but I think that obviously it was a, you know, whether, whether it's completely true or not, we don't know. But I think it does reveal, and the stories we've discussed just now do reveal that he was in the early 1800s. So by the time he's in his 40s, he is a celebrity. He is known over, all over Japan as a very significant cultural figure.
39:53 Alastair Sooke? Can, I mean, can I just bring, this is something to kind of, since we're doing at this moment, these kind of performance things. If we skip forward in the chronology, but it just ties this point together. We do have a piece of evidence which comes from 1834, so a bit later. And it's a flyer, and it's a flyer that is advertising one of these so-called calligraphy and painting parties that we know Hokusai was involved with, and he performed at it on, we learn, the 16th day of the 8th month in 1834. And the reason I bring it up now is because I think it's useful to remember the vogue, the appetite for these public performances, where as a piece of entertainment, you might go
40:39 Alastair Sooke? probably into some nice restaurants, maybe there's an upstairs party room, a lot of people are gathering, and you're there to watch these bravura, virtuosic performances on behalf of the artists. And this particular flyer has this text by Hokusai, which I think is quite interesting. He talks about it in, in this text, he says, "I've enjoyed painting since childhood, yet for more than 70 years now," and forgive me for skipping forward in the chronology, "but for more than 70 years now, I've not been able to fathom its depths. Over the years, I have attended calligraphy and painting parties a hundred, maybe a thousand times. Personally, I've gotten bored with their games, and these days I try to avoid them."
41:20 James Fox? I didn't know this.
41:21 Alastair Sooke? That's, that's the flyer advertising one of these things, but it, but it suggests that he really, this was a big, big part of his life.
41:27 James Fox? Yeah, and it also suggests that art, and it goes back to something we said earlier, that art in this period is not confined to the art world, it's in the real world.
41:36 Alastair Sooke? Yes.
41:36 James Fox? It's something that ordinary people are encountering, they're buying, they're using, they're seeing, they're enjoying every single day. And
41:43 Alastair Sooke? Is it just a case of capitalism, red in tooth and claw? Because what seems to be going on is there are, you mentioned the publishers. There are enterprising people in Japan, as there always have been, but particularly at this moment, this moment of prosperity. And people have ideas about how to make cash. They are finding out, they're testing and then catering to public appetites. And there was an appetite to watch these. I mean, I would love to see a show like that.
42:09 James Fox? Can you imagine? It'd be great. So we now move into the 1810s. So Hokusai is now in his 50s. And one of the reasons I've always loved Hokusai, Alastair, is that he's one of those people to whom crazy things always happen. He's like Werner Herzog, you know Werner Herzog, ridiculous things are always happening to him. This is the case with Hokusai and in the early 1810s, so he's in his 50s. Do you know what happens to him? He's walking along a path in the countryside. He's walking back from a temple, maybe he's come from a calligraphy party, who knows? And he gets struck by lightning.
42:44 Alastair Sooke? I mean, only Hokusai.
42:45 James Fox? What are the chances? Anyway, he gets struck by lightning, he gets knocked off his feet, thrown into a paddy field. Quite severely injured, actually. But he sees this as a fantastic thing. I don't know if you've seen the film, One of My Guilty Pleasures, it's the 90s John Travolta movie, Phenomenon.
43:03 Alastair Sooke? I haven't seen it.
43:04 James Fox? It's very good, actually. If you've got some time, you should try it out. John Travolta, ordinary mechanic in a midwestern town, gets struck by some paranormal lightning and wakes up the next morning as a genius.
43:16 Alastair Sooke? Superpowers.
43:17 James Fox? Superpowers. And actually, Hokusai saw it this way. You know, of course he'd been injured, he'd been bruised, he'd been battered by this lightning.
43:24 Alastair Sooke? It's lucky it didn't happen in reverse for him because he was a genius and it could have taken away all this.
43:27 James Fox? I know, I know, but what it does is it crystallizes his ambitions in some ways.
43:32 Alastair Sooke? Right.
43:33 James Fox? And it makes him think, I've got to do something even greater.
43:35 Alastair Sooke? He also, he changes his name here, doesn't he?
43:37 James Fox? He does change his name. I've forgotten, I haven't written down his name.
43:40 Alastair Sooke? Can I tell you?
43:41 James Fox? Please.
43:42 Alastair Sooke? Again, pronunciation, forgive me, but it's T A I T O, Taito.
43:47 James Fox? Taito, and what does Taito mean?
43:48 Alastair Sooke? Well, literally, apparently means receiving the Big Dipper.
43:52 James Fox? Oh, right. Well, he obviously got struck by the Big Dipper anyway.
43:56 Alastair Sooke? Yes, star blessed, I think, is one looser translation.
43:59 James Fox? Okay, that would make sense, because certainly he felt that it was a gift from the heavens, this lightning strike. And it's one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons why in the 1810s, he embarks on, I mean, what in some ways, Alastair, is one of the most ambitious projects that any artist has ever undertaken in history, which is essentially to draw everything in existence.
44:20 Alastair Sooke? Oh, my god.
44:21 James Fox? To create a visual encyclopedia of the universe itself. And he calls this project manga.
44:28 Alastair Sooke? Right.
44:29 James Fox? Now, when you hear the word manga, manga, as we call it in English today, what do you think of?
44:35 Alastair Sooke? I think broad terms, essentially, a kind of Japanese comic book.
44:40 James Fox? Yeah.
44:40 Alastair Sooke? I think, what was the beginning of the modern manga tradition? Is it Astro Boy?
44:45 James Fox? Yeah.
44:45 Alastair Sooke? I forget the artist's name, but this is, essentially, there's a story, there are characters in visual form, and hugely popular, kind of think comics, but there's, I think crucially, there is a narrative element, right?
44:57 James Fox? Yes, but that's not how it used to be.
44:59 Alastair Sooke? And isn't the case here in what you're referring to.
45:01 James Fox? I mean, Hokusai wasn't the first person to create the term manga, but he was one of the first to do so, and certainly the first to properly popularise it. The term back then essentially meant random sketches. So it comes from man means random or assorted, and ga means line drawing, it's why we go shunga and bijinga.
45:21 Alastair Sooke? I see.
45:22 James Fox? Means a line drawing. And so this was essentially a set of sketches of things. And over the course of his life, he produces, I don't know, a dozen plus volumes, thousands of drawings. And he draws absolutely everything. Have you ever leafed through these manga books?
45:39 Alastair Sooke? I I have, I'm slightly familiar with them. I've never really studied them in great depth, but the images that I've seen from them look almost like, are they grouped together by type and theme? So it could be whirlpools.
45:55 James Fox? Yes.
45:56 Alastair Sooke? Or it could be particular type of figure. It's almost like a cheat sheet for artists?
46:01 James Fox? Yeah, they had a pedagogical function. So these draw, I mean, as you say, there was nothing that was too banal for him to draw. You know, he would draw, there's a whole page on pots, for instance, and there's a page on grass, and there's a page on insects. And part of the purpose for these drawings was to provide a copybook for professional artists. And partly it was to encourage amateurs to take up drawing. Again, it's that idea of art being part of the wider world.
46:28 Alastair Sooke? When you first hear about them, you look at the images, it looks almost like it's something which would be a useful reference resource for him as an artist. Like in the future, he might be, I mentioned whirlpools, a publisher might come on and say, I want 30 views of famous whirlpools in Japan. And he's like, aha, well, you know, luckily I've got my, here's the manga and then, you know, you can replicate them. Are you saying that they were available for sale and there was an appetite to buy this stuff?
46:52 James Fox? They were not just available for sale, it was a massive bestseller.
46:55 Alastair Sooke? Right.
46:56 James Fox? Multiple volumes, people were buying them by the truckload. Of course, the publisher got all the money. He didn't really make any money from his his series of manga volumes. But I just, I I just love the images you find in them. There's one here, which we'll put up on the site, of a man pulling all these different faces, he's blowing out a candle with his nose, he's sticking some chopsticks into his nostrils, he's pulling his cheeks apart, he's tying strings around his ears. My favourite one, because I do have a quite scatological sense of humour.
47:27 Alastair Sooke? Right.
47:27 James Fox? Alistair, my favourite one is this this fantastic image in which, it looks very elegant. You've got this wonderful architectural setting, done in western perspective, so already he's playing with western perspective. It looks very stylish and then you begin, as you look closely, to realise What's going on? And what you're actually looking at is a toilet cubicle.
47:49 Alastair Sooke? Okay.
47:50 James Fox? And there's a samurai warrior in the cubicle, crouched down, doing his business.
47:55 Alastair Sooke? Oh, James.
47:56 James Fox? Straining a little bit.
47:57 Alastair Sooke? Why have you brought this image into our lives?
47:58 James Fox? I just think, you know, you're the one who brought the octopus.
48:01 Alastair Sooke? I was keeping the tone high there. You've really lowered it now.
48:04 James Fox? But anyway, he's doing his business and his three assistants are outside the cubicle. And each one of them is holding his nose. And again, that sense of humour, that sense of freshness and vitality and constant experimentation and pushing the envelope is the kind of thing that Hokusai always did.
48:19 Alastair Sooke? Also a sort of sense of actual just acute observation of human behaviour. And an ability not to feel hidebound by conventions and rules.
48:29 James Fox? No, yeah.
48:30 Alastair Sooke? So the comic strain is clearly is quite key and is quite common in a lot of Hokusai's work.
48:35 James Fox? Absolutely. He's always having fun. And I think it goes back to those early days as probably, you know, a delivery boy where he was seeing the city.
48:42 Alastair Sooke? Yes.
48:43 James Fox? Seeing the rough and tumble of people in the streets. He was never an ivory tower artist. He was someone who was absolutely part of his society and interested in every single aspect of daily life.
48:56 Alastair Sooke? I think as well, and this is a little throw forward and we may return to it, but whilst we're talking about the manga, the thing, one of the things I find so fascinating, just in the history of ideas, the history of art, is that there is a moment, we'll come to it, in the 19th century where Japanese art starts to flood the West. And there is a story which was put about first at the turn of the 20th century by a French art historian called Léon Benedict, that there was a French artist, a painter, etcher, printmaker, Felix Brachmond, who was the first supposedly to come under the influence of Japanese art, when he encounters some in a Parisian print shop in the 1850s. And the thing that he sees is the first volume of Hokusai's manga. So this.
49:43 Alastair Sooke? The origin story, if you like, of the influence of Japanese art and Hokusai's art in particular, later on European art, which is so fascinating and so crucial, is related to this work that you're talking about now.
49:55 James Fox? That's really interesting. Well, I think we should just get through to the 1820s because he starts on these manga pieces, very successful, only increasing his celebrity. And in 1820, Alastair, he turns 60. This is, he's already a lot older than the average Japanese person.
50:13 Alastair Sooke? Cue name change.
50:15 James Fox? Cue name change, exactly. For various complicated reasons that I honestly, in truth, don't understand. 60 is a very significant age in Japanese society and it essentially means you've almost completed one cycle of the calendar. So when you turn 60, you almost begin all over again. And so he renames himself at that point, Iitsu. Not Itsu, like the fast move place.
50:41 Alastair Sooke? He did say he was a delivery boy.
50:42 James Fox? But Iitsu. And he's very optimistic. He thinks, right, I'm 60, I'm starting all over again, very exciting. But actually, the 1820s, his 60s, is one of the worst decades in his life.
50:55 Alastair Sooke? I have heard a little bit about this. I mean, it's astonishing slash tragic, the various things that before him in this period. So he's already been struck by lightning. You'd think that would be enough misfortune for one man's life.
51:10 James Fox? I don't know.
51:11 Alastair Sooke? It isn't in his case at all.
51:13 James Fox? No, I mean, it begins in the early 1820s. His daughter dies, a much-loved daughter dies. Then his second wife dies. So his first wife had died back in 1794 after he was thrown out of this, the Shunsho workshop. His second wife now dies. And, but in a way, the biggest problem he faces in the 1820s is his grandson.
51:32 Alastair Sooke? Yeah, I've heard a little bit about him. He's generally described, in the sources that I've come across, as delinquent.
51:39 James Fox? Yes, I think that's the-
51:41 Alastair Sooke? He had a gambling problem?
51:42 James Fox? He had an enormous gambling problem and ended up racking up enormous debts. And the way that debts work in Japan at this time is that if anyone in the family has debts, the other, the rest of the family are liable-
51:55 Alastair Sooke? I see.
51:56 James Fox? -to repay them.
51:56 Alastair Sooke? So Hokusai is liable?
51:57 James Fox? Hokusai is liable for colossal debts and he doesn't have any money anyway. And so this is a really, really difficult for him financially, but it's also very difficult for him psychologically. He takes it very, very hard. And then to make matters worse, towards the end of the decade, people think he actually suffers a stroke.
52:14 Alastair Sooke? Hmm.
52:15 James Fox? Certainly suffers some very significant medical episode.
52:21 Alastair Sooke? Shall I say the bizarre thing about the stroke is that you often read about it and people suggest that it seems to have permanently affected his drawing, that he never quite recovers the fluency. The really bizarre thing is that we've been talking now for whatever it is, the best part of an hour, and we haven't reached the great masterpieces that Hokusai creates.
52:41 James Fox? I know.
52:41 Alastair Sooke? So it's post lightning strike, it's post-stroke that Hokusai creates the images which have made him world famous.
52:50 James Fox? And that, Alastair, is what we're going to talk about in our next episode, when we'll conclude the story of Katsushika Hokusai and explore his most famous work, The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, featuring, of course, A Great Wave. Until next time, goodbye.
53:07 Alastair Sooke? Goodbye.
53:13 James Fox? If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.
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