Stolen Wave

Who owns a wave?

In the 1830s, a print of Hokusai's Great Wave cost about as much as a bowl of noodles. It was made by four sets of hands, a publisher, an artist, a carver and a printer, and it was meant to be enjoyed for a season and thrown away. Then ships arrived, and the packing paper became art history.

Stolen Waves follows what happened next. Whistler dressed a model in a borrowed kimono and called the result his own invention. Van Gogh painted three copies and named every one after its source. Monet built a garden shaped like the prints on his wall. Cassatt took Utamaro's way of seeing women's private lives and turned it on her own. Toulouse-Lautrec flattened colour into the modern poster, Siegfried Bing gave a whole movement the name of his Paris shop, and Claude Flight carried the woodblock logic into British linocut.

I'm an artist who cuts his own relief prints, and this isn't a book that hands down a single verdict of theft or homage. Influence, theft and admiration were never cleanly separable, and the story is better, and harder, for it. The book also asks who got left out: the carvers and printers whose names history didn't keep.

Twelve chapters, a conclusion, a visual glossary of ukiyo-e, a bibliography and a full index. It's for readers who love prints, collect them, make them, or just want to know how the Western eye was changed by something sold for noodle money.

About the author: Tony West is an artist and author based in Thailand. He works in linocut, silverpoint, acrylic and caricature, and publishes through West Art Press.