2023-12-08 14:36:00
“Spring is coming/ I am forty-three years old/ Still here in front of my white rice”. This haikai by Issa (1763-1828), contemporary poet of Hokusaï (1760-1849) and almost as fertile as the artist with 30,000 works, could summarize the power, the humor, the little reverence, the greed for genius specific to one who, aging better than a grand cru, excelled in the painting of a heron as in the drawing of a ghost, in the art of landscape as in that of eroticism, in painting as in printmaking and, before and after all, drawing. Hazan reissues a clear, precise, deep and concentrated text by Henri-Alexis Baatsch, dating from 1985, in a luxury edition so beautiful that it deserves permanent rereading, as the quality of the reproductions, on lined paper, gives the sensation of to have Hokusai at home, and therefore to experience his clownish, mischievous, dramatic, omnivorous, ecstatic wonder, his “popular and refined art”. The author, Henri-Alexis Baatsch, born in 1948 and specialist in German philosophy, evokes for Libération his own history with Japan and this prodigious designer whom he compares to Leonardo da Vinci, for his freedom, and to the Venetians of the 18th century , for their art of capturing, without distinction or hierarchy, all the manifestations and all the mysteries of daily life. This in a country, that of the Edo era, closed to the rest of the world, frozen and stratified in perpetual peace, and which “languished in its celebration of life”. Hokusai was born and grew up in this atmosphere; its sparks make everything explode.
Why and how did you go to Japan?
Around 1976-1977, the writer, poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy devoted a special issue of the prestigious 20th century magazine – he was its editor-in-chief – to contemporary Japanese art. On his return from Japan, he gave passionate praise of this country that he was discovering to his large circle of artist and writer friends. I was from this circle. One of us, Marie Parra-Aledo, was more daring and decided to try to work and live there. She then learned Japanese and has since become a doctor in this language. In 1981, she invited me to join her there for six months. She already had a whole circle of friends in the Japanese contemporary art world. From there, having married that same year and both working as precarious freelancers in the art world (texts, articles, translations) both European and Japanese (for her), we attempted the adventure in the spring of 1984 to settle more permanently in Tokyo, in fact in the outer suburbs. This lasted until September 1986.
What was your life like there?
We were completely immersed in this small town located 20 kilometers from the nearest central district of Tokyo (Shibuya), there was no clear distinction between town and countryside, houses and offices were separated by remains of rice fields or orchards, and our little girl who went to Japanese kindergarten began to speak in Japanese; I had to do it myself. There were probably no more than 20 Westerners in this city of 50,000 inhabitants dependent on Greater Tokyo. On the occasion of this stay, Eric Hazan and Jean-Christophe Bailly commissioned me for a text on Hokusai upon my departure. So I wrote Hokusaï sitting on the tatami mats, at a coffee table and with a small portable mechanical Olivetti typewriter, the day sometimes punctuated by the life of the neighboring school with its bells, sometimes in another low house, no far from a small humming factory, sometimes with its chemical miasma, and the regular bell of the train level crossing.
Were you familiar with Hokusai’s work before going to Japan?
I didn’t discover Hokusai in Japan but I hardly knew him and I was absolutely not the only one then. Japan was still a little visited country. On the other hand, since adolescence, I was quite familiar with the history of Japan until before the period of imperialist expansion because of casual readings which had fascinated me. I also knew some classics and ancient poets, Akutagawa, Soseki, and also I had not remained indifferent to the tales of Lafcadio Hearn and the cinematographic adaptations of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, such as Spider’s Castle. Truly modern Japan interested me little but I have since written an essay Mishima, modernity, rite and death (Editions du Rocher 2006), because his suicide had struck me a lot in 1970 – how do we do it? to move from refined poetry to a sort of blind brutality towards oneself and those close to them, moreover in the name of bygone principles? – and I wanted to check if I could “hold” an entire essay devoted to this extraordinary character but whom I did not admire, his romantic imagination aside.
We sometimes think, when looking at a painting or drawing by Hokusai, of the Bedside Notes of Sei Shonagon, who lived at the court of the Japanese emperor around the year 1000? Do you see any connections between the two?
Hokusai was a commoner, a hundred leagues from the court lady of the Heian era, 700 years before him. They had a common, spiritual good: traditional Japanese poetry, codified before the year 1000 and circulating among all educated people, the Japanese feeling for nature that it expresses, Shinto beliefs, festivals and ritual celebrations which are continued over a thousand years. Elegant and cultured women continued to read the Bedside Notes (or the Pillow Notebooks as they are also called), he showed it in drawing, because the feelings and reflections of Sei Shonagon, were not too removed from their own lives and ways of dressing, but it’s a bit like someone who knew how to ride a horse in the 19th century could read “as if they were there” a chivalry novel or a Walter Scott. This is no longer possible today.
Does Hokusai’s work shed light on contemporary Japan?
Many refined details of life such as invitation cards, occasional poems, small delicately worked objects, ornate calendars of which Hokusai gave innumerable variations, still exist in Japan, but they are not specific to it ( except that his poetic imagination is undoubtedly richer): all artists, whether they have practiced the noble art of painting on screens or on silk or the “vulgar” art of prints, have made . Hokusaï’s Manga – these free drawings, linked or not linked together, which have made part of his reputation – has been imitated by others, but it is above all the practice of the illustrated book (and abundantly illustrated), little cher, who is at the origin of what we today call manga. But I really don’t see a precise, specific link between Hokusai and contemporary Japan. The films retracing the civil wars of the Japanese Middle Ages are inspired by other print artists as much and more than by him and when it comes to ghosts or erotic plates, if Hokusai gave some exceptional specters, he stopped quickly.
What links have you kept with Japan?
After 1986, I continued to meet Japanese artists who came to visit us in France and to have friends in this sector. But I never returned to Japan because my wife’s acute “Japaneseness” (I say that without malice) played a role in our divorce and because the invasion of the city, the asphalting of the land, the multiplication of overwhelming buildings, deprived me of any prospect of rediscovering something of what was still a certain proximity to the ground and nature thirty-five years ago. And then we do not return with pleasure as a tourist to the place where we have recorded a few essential years of our life. For the same reason, I only did stylistic edits and title checks for the deluxe reissue of Hokusai. Finally, in 2023 I wrote an essay on the painting of Hiroshige (1797-1858) at the request of Editions Hazan. For a luxury edition which will be dedicated to him and which will be the counterpart in 2024 of the book on Hokusai. I conducted this research based on what is available here and on the Internet. In the case of a painter whose fame lies in his landscapes, there is no point in looking for places that have been too transformed to evoke anything from the past. My own memories of the 1980s were forged at a time a little less distanced from the artist’s time than those I could have constructed today.
Henri-Alexis Baatsch, Hokusaï, the madman of drawing, Hazan, 223 pp., €120.
After written
In a postscript, Henri-Alexis Baatsch clarified this, which does not seem unrelated to the passage of time in Hokusaï (and Sei Shonagon): “If you want to quote me, please use the tenses of the past when it is appropriate: we live in a time of permanent prosopopeia: “he will, she loves him, he will be…”, when the protagonists have been dead for a long time or when the fact mentioned belongs to their distant past. This flight from recognizing the past and the evanescence of things and beings weighs on me. When a life has ended, its past is twice closed. And when an event is really distant, even the person who experienced it has difficulty reconstructing it. So, why try to tear it away from its “past” condition? There is a very nice Japanese title about it: Things that are now in the past.
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