Large Cartoon Eyes and a Big Wave in Prints Started Powerful Art Trends
Before the Big Eyes, there was the Great Wave.
When people in the West turn their attention to Japanese art, these are the two archetypes that come to mind. In recent decades, the big-eyed cartoon character of Japanese comic books, animation, and contemporary art, has influenced even Western culture. A century before that, Japanese art prints had invented the giant wave, and that too has endured as an icon of Japanese art well known around the world.
Most recently, the cartoon-like characters with the large, glinting child’s eyes have even become part of cutting-edge Pop art, showing up in the works of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. He’s put the big eyes on smiling flowers, mushrooms, and a large sculpture, Oval Buddha. A far older work, the Great Wave woodblock print, while having some modern imitation, continues to appear as a benchmark in art history. It was prominently featured in two recent BBC programs, the latest being “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”
The big eyes and the great wave also have lessons about the interchange of Asian and Western culture in the development of art, or what the expert’s today call the development of “visual culture.”
The more ancient of the two stories (about the wave) begins in the early 1800s, when the more traditional treatment of waves in Japanese design suddenly gave rise to a single giant wave, thanks to the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).
Known as Kokusai (first name), he departed from flat Chinese style painting and a design tradition of “rough sea screens” by adopting Western-style perspective. Western art was reaching Japan by way of Dutch and French books and drawings. As he mulled these changes, he formed a new portrayal of the cresting surf at Enoshima beach in Kanagawa, near ancient Edo (now Tokyo). The beach still today is the best for surfing in Japan. He designed one large, stand-out lacy wave, put a boat in the torrent, and placed Mount Fuji in the far distance, smaller and dimmer, as a matter of visual perspective.
As a woodblock printer, and sometime illustrator-cartoonist, Kokusai was commercially minded, and that led to his new approach in the now-famous “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” Of these, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) turned out to be the favorite, especially outside of Japan. The single wave—a giant breaker—stood out like a main character, a role typically played in Japanese block prints by a prince, warrior, or courtesan.
After this, the single wave became a symbol for many concerns in Japanese culture. The wave came to stand for foreign invasion, whether Mongol or Western, and also natural disaster and the warrior gods. “The wave’s authority depends not simply on its scale but also its singularity,” art historian Christine Guth writes in the current Art Bulletin. “It is, in the eyes of Euro-Americans, Japan’s most representative artwork.”
In Hokusai’s day, thousands of inexpensive woodblock prints of his various scenes and stories were sold, but the single wave motif was a favorite, leading Hokusai “to use it again and again in various combinations,” Guth says. “Commercial opportunism led other print artists to draw on the cultural capital encoded in the market-tested Hokusai ‘brand’ and in so doing opened the waves to interpretations that kept them fresh.”
In short, the Great Wave became a permanent visual image for Japan, much as the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night come to mind when the world thinks of European art and culture.
After World War II, however, a new image rivaled the Great Wave. With the rise of modern Japanese comics (called Manga) that rival was the Big Eyes, now a dominant image in cartooning and Pop art.
That story begins with Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), a serious medical student who turned out to be the founder of modern Japanese comics. For Japanese culture, he invented the big-eyed, cute characters (though he proudly said he borrowed the big-eye concept from the American cartoon, “Betty Boop”). His most famous early character was a bionic boy, “Astro Boy,” who rocketed around by nuclear power. Other big-eyed characters were “Kimba the Lion” and “Black Jack,” among a growing number of other child-like heroes and creatures.
As a result, the feature of large child-like eyes came to dominate many artists in the Japanese cartoon industry. They soon exported such branded characters as “Sailor Moon” and “Pokeman,” and Western artists picked up its variations. Eventually, even sophisticated Pop artists such as Murakami adopted the big eyes because of their strong cultural reference—that is, their dominant place in visual culture.
So today, the Great Wave and the Big Eyes may be the most salient aspects of Japanese visual culture, at least to the West. Both of them came by way of cultural exchanges, adaptation, and successful commercialization. Nevertheless, both were developed by profoundly great artists—Kokusai and Tezuka—both of whom did a vast number of works in a great variety. They just happened, meanwhile, to hit upon two icons that stood the test of time: the Great Wave and the Big Eyes.
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