Mt.
Fuji

This collection of Yayoi Kusama’s prints radiates the artist’s awe when encountering Mount Fuji. After a long tradition of Japanese artists who have paid homage to the monumental single peak, many of the prints were produced laboriously as woodcuts, in addition to a lithographic representation.

Born in Matsumoto City, 1920s Japan, Yayoi Kusama studied Nihonga painting at the Kyoto City University of Art. Nihonga is a style of art, developed around the turn of the 20th Century which rigidly followed traditional Japanese and formalistic ways of painting in an effort to counterbalance the growing influence of Western art in the country. Translated literally, Nihonga means ‘Japanese painting’. This collection of prints then, in their traditional and proudly nationalist subject and composition, sees Kusama harking back to her early training, but inevitably with her own personal twist.

In the lithograph Mt. Fuji, from 1983, Mount Fuji is given volume using her signature polka dots. Cleverly concentrating larger dots towards the centre of the mountain and radiating smaller dots away from this point, she effectively creates dimensionality. This choice creates a perspectival depth that is not felt in traditional paintings and woodcuts of the mountain. Traditionally depth is limited to the gentle juxtaposition of fore and backgrounds in Japanese art, which uses haziness and the subtle difference in pastel shades to do so. Kusama’s print does not limit itself to subtlety: adding depth to within the background, to the mountain itself, she makes the summit appear to ‘jump forward’ at the viewer, creating an impression of its sublime vastness and impact. Her colour palette, too, defies tradition, as she uses vivid blues and greens to create a picture postcard view of the mountain, in her 2015 woodcut series Mt. Fuji In Seven Colours.