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Views of Mount Fuji
100 Views of Mount Fuji: a selection
Mt. Fuji has a dominant place in the cultural
psyche of Japan, both for the people who have lived there, and for
those who have come to imagine Japan from a distance. A potent
metaphor in classical love poetry, revered since medieval times by
mountain-climbing sects of both the Shintō and Buddhist faiths, it
is still today a site of pilgrimage; over 100,000 climb its peak
every summer.
The enduring
popularity of Fuji in the art and visual culture of Japan is
remarkable. Fuji was once regarded as an eternal, unchanging
symbol, and indeed has not changed its shape radically since its
last eruption in 1707, but artists have not ceased to try and
represent it in new
ways.
The exhibition
100 Views of Mount
Fuji (11 May - 29 July 2001) explored a
wide range of manifestations of the mountain in Japanese art, as
portrayed in 100 works by painters and print designers from the
seventeenth century to the present, including Katsushika Hokusai
(1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), Munakata Shikō
(1903-75) and Hagiwara Hideo (born 1913).