The Legacy of Hokusai’s Great Wave
Of course, the Great Wave was made to be reproduced. It has never had a definitive form. Hokusai’s original brush drawing would have been destroyed when the printers cut the woodblocks in 1831, and though no one knows exactly how many impressions from the original blocks still exist, it’s thought to be about 100. No two prints could ever have been the same. Variation was built into its creation – yet somehow, despite or perhaps because of all the variations, the design itself retains, whatever its context, a sort of universal meaningfulness.