Katsushika Hokusai.

Hokusai spent his life pursuing a single thing: the true line. « At seventy-three I have come to understand a little of the structure of nature », he wrote, convinced that real mastery would come only after a hundred years. The Great Wave, its claw of foam held above the boats, was born of that stubborn patience.

Born in the working-class district of Honjo, in Edo, he changed his name more than thirty times and his home nearly a hundred. Engraver, novel illustrator, painter of surimono, he passed through every genre before settling, past the age of sixty, on landscape as his great subject.

The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, around 1831, established the mountain as a presence and as a measure of the floating world. When these sheets reached Europe they shook Monet, Degas and Van Gogh. Japonisme begins here, in the Prussian blue of a wave.

Galerie Yanaka has gathered Hokusai's prints since 2016, with particular attention to early impressions of the Fuji series.