Hokusai’s Most Emblematic Work Hits Moscow

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by painter Katsushika Hokusai is one of the most iconic prints in the world and in December 2018, this seminal work in Japanese art history made a splash in Moscow, blown-up on the side of one of the city’s buildings.

Produced between 1831 and 1832, during the ukiyo-e movement, a popular art whose name translates to ‘images of an ephemeral and floating world’. The movement was stylistically based on the Buddhist concept of impermanence of the world and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanawaga is emblematic of this kind of work. Produced as part of the series ‘Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji’, the work stands out for its intense use of Prussian blue. The viewer is drawn into the hollow of the unbridled wave about to engulf the three frail craft with Mount Fuji as the only witness in the background.

The print, symbolizing the beauty and power of the indomitable nature, has influenced many artists such as Claude Debussy, with La Mer, Van Gogh, whose use of deep blue and dynamic waves in his painting Starry Night is a nod to Hokusai as well as Roy Lichtenstein with his pop art Drowning Girl. The work continues to fascinate today and is reproduced on across every possible platform, including a set of buildings in Russia.

Named ‘Etalon City’, the artistic urban project, spanning a residential complex of nine buildings in southwestern Moscow, exhibits silhouettes of cities such as New York, Chicago, Barcelona and Monaco on the facades. Six of these nine buildings serve as backdrops for the monumental fresco covering nearly 60,000 square meters. Life-size art!