Collection: One-Pencil Drawing and Manga

Of immediate freshness are the woodblock prints from the collection Conveying the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things with a Single Stroke of the Brush (Denshin kaishu Ippitsu gafu, 1823), with refined tones of turquoise and deep pink. The title itself expresses the entire philosophy of Katsushika Hokusai: the belief that art should go beyond mere reproduction of reality to capture the vital energy of each subject. As Van Gogh recalled in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888, "the charm of Hokusai lies in the ability to remove the superfluous to let the essential shine through."
The Manga (1814) are an extraordinary collection of spontaneous sketches and visual notes: human figures, animals, landscapes, scenes of daily life, and decorative motifs follow one another with grace, irony, and precision. They were volumes intended as tools for teaching and artistic practice, used to be copied, studied, and admired. They partly anticipate modern Japanese visual culture, but with a very different meaning from what we now associate with the word "manga," which has become synonymous with comic. At the time, in fact, the term referred to "unconstrained images" and referred to educational, playful, and illustrative collections.