Hokusai | Monet

Though records of Monet’s first encounter with Japanese art vary – some have claimed that he was introduced to it at art school; others have cited a trip to a Dutch spice shop where original prints were used as wrapping paper – there’s no doubt about the influence it had upon him. A zealous collector from the 1870s, Monet built a collection of more than 230 Japanese woodblock prints at his home in Giverny, most of which fall into the genre of ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’) – works that depicted the decadent lifestyle of the new merchant class in Edo-period Japan and the beauty of the natural world in bold, flat planes of colour. Among Monet’s collection were works by Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro, and in the 1890s he began incorporating elements from the masters’ work into his own. This exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art focuses on Hokusai’s influence in particular, pairing Monet’s painting Massif de chrysanthèmes (1897) – a close-up view of a sprawling bed of chrysanthemums, one of Japan’s national symbols – with prints from Hokusai’s famed Large Flowers (8 February–10 August).

Find out more from the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s website.
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Massif de chrysanthèmes (1897), Claude Monet. Private collection. Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s

Chrysanthemums and Horsefly (c. 1833–34), Katsushika Hokusai. Minneapolis Institute of Art.