[Julie Steiner]

Glenn and Jim, I'm glad you found it interesting.

Rick, I appreciate your frustration (which you've noted here before) about the technical trend in art curation. I agree that it too often has a "to a man with a hammer" (or x-ray, or fancy new chemical analysis gadget), "everything looks like a nail" approach.

Actually, it was similar frustration with the mid-1980s trend toward regarding works of literature primarily as documents about the socioeconomic structure of the society of the author's time and place, rather than as universal vehicles for beauty and emotional impact, that led me to change my major from comparative literature. The comp lit department made it clear that to properly appreciate literature, one must deliberately avoid experiencing any sort of admiration, wonder, or joy. Bah.

But in this case, when all that exist (and all that most of Hokusai's contemporaries ever saw) are mass-produced reproductions of Hokusai's original painting, I think pondering the technical details of that reproductive process—and on variations in the individual copies that one may encounter in museums—is appropriate. Especially when 22 of the 111 prints are missing the clouds in the background, either due to light damage and fugitive colorants or due to that level of the original woodblocks having gone missing by the time of that particular printing.

Surely it's worth pondering that Hokusai's original painting is more distant from some 19th-century prints than from others.