Collection: Manga and Ippitsu gafu

The Manga (1814) are an extraordinary collection of spontaneous sketches and visual notes: human figures, animals, landscapes, scenes from everyday life, and decorative motifs follow one another with grace, irony, and precision. These volumes were conceived as tools for teaching and artistic practice, and were therefore meant to be copied, studied, and admired. They partly anticipate modern Japanese visual culture, but with a meaning very different from the one we now associate with the word “manga,” which has become synonymous with comics. At the time, in fact, the term meant “unrestrained pictures” and referred to educational, playful, and illustrative collections.

Immediately striking for their freshness are the woodblock prints from the collection Conveying the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things with a Single Brushstroke (Denshin kaishu Ippitsu gafu, 1823), with their refined tones of turquoise and vivid pink. The title itself expresses Katsushika Hokusai’s entire philosophy: the conviction that art should go beyond the simple reproduction of reality to capture the vital energy of every subject. As Van Gogh recalled in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888, “Hokusai’s appeal lies in his ability to remove the superfluous so that the essential can shine.”