When Jitendra V. Singh, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, was nearly 60 years old, he finally purchased his first woodblock print by respected Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. -6 views of Mt. Fuji.”
It was 2013, and Dr. Singh was fascinated by Hokusai's view of Japan's sacred mountains, the centerpiece of each image in the artist's series. Sometimes it's dominant, sometimes it's in the background, but it's always present.
By then, Dr. Singh had undertaken three long journeys to the Himalayas, a high-altitude trek on Mount Everest, and a trip to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a sacred site for Hindus.
Dr. Singh, now 70 and retired, said this during an interview from his apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “For me, Hokusai captured the essence of the mountains.”
Fascinated by Hokusai and his images, Dr. Singh set out on a singular quest: to assemble the entire “36 Views” series (there are actually 46 images). He completed the challenge in January 2023 and this week he completed Christies' complete set. Estimates are $3 million to $5 million.
There are probably fewer than 10 complete collections in existence in the world. The series includes “Under the Well of the Great Waves of Kanagawa,” created in 1831, depicting Mount Fuji rising behind claw-like blue waves and wrapping around a ship. It has become an iconic image, reproduced on coffee cups, sneakers and even curtains around the world. However, most of the valuable sets are stored in famous museums. These include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, and the French National Library. The set sold for $1.47 million at Sotheby's in 2002, but the buyer remains anonymous.
This series is considered the greatest work of the artist, who was born in 1760 and began making woodcuts at a young age. He was a ukiyo-e artist famous for his prints that expressed the daily lives and travels of people in the countryside and cities, as well as the tranquil scenery of the countryside, with luxurious colors and exquisite details. (Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world.”) When his work was discovered by French artists, along with the work of other ukiyo-e artists of the period, they were fascinated. Japanese artists and Hokusai in particular had a special influence on Impressionism. Because, as one admirer wrote at the time, the work revealed “an unexpected page from the great book of world art.” The influence became known as Japonisme.
Certainly, Dr. Singh has rarely focused on one aspect of one artist's work. Still, he never put it in. “36 Views of Mount Fuji” It is on display at his former home near San Francisco.
“I don’t want to show them my house and be happy,” he said. Instead, he kept them sealed inside a Japanese box. “They are so delicate,” he said.
It was not simply the beauty of the print that captivated Dr. Singh, but the subject matter. As a religious Hindu, his mountain journey was emotionally powerful. “Because climbing a mountain is a metaphor for our lives,” he said. “We are all alone. “If you strip everything away, life is a journey.”
His high mountain path to Hokusai prints included his first sacred pilgrimage to Tibet in the summer of 2006, a seven-day overland journey in a Toyota Land Cruiser from Lhasa to Mount Kailash. ” he emailed me a snapshot showing his beard growing over several weeks.
After his circuit of Mount Kailash, he underwent a ritual bathing in the melted glacial waters of Lake Manasarovar, a sacred lake in Hindu mythology believed to have been formed by Lord Brahma. ,” he explained, “I thought I needed that kind of divine help.”
doctor. SINGH did not see his first Hokusai until he was in his 40s and traveling the world. He grew up in Lucknow, a large city in northern India, as one of 11 children from three marriages. “His father was a high-ranking civil servant,” he said. “In our family, art was considered trivial.”
Dr. Singh recalled that his town “had a good high school library, and I read a lot of literature,” and he went on to receive a full scholarship to Stanford Business School, where he earned a doctorate. Mid 20s. He remembers seeing Mount Fuji in sunlight for the first time while flying home from Stanford to Delhi via Tokyo. “It was a symbol of beauty and purity in its purest form.”
In 1990, he visited Japan, where the mother of a student from the United States presented him with a high-quality print containing mountain images by Kawase Hasui, one of Japan's most famous printmakers of the 20th century. Dr. Singh himself chose Hokusai's “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” and the image known as “Red Fuji” as a cheap replica, as he admired the red hue of the mountains. “The Hokusai couple were amazing,” he remembered.
He hung a replica in his home in suburban Philadelphia. Over the next few years, Hokusai's work grew on him. “I thought the details and composition – the people, the landscape, the sea – were very stylized and beautiful,” he recalled. But he never imagined buying it until 2011, when he made some money from his investments and visited Tokyo again. He asked his friend where he could buy more Hokusai prints and was sent to the Jimbocho area, where there was an art gallery selling small prints from the Ukiyo-e period.
He met with director Ken Caplan at the Mita Museum of Art and confessed that he would like to buy the entire set if he could afford it.
Thus began the final stage of his journey that lasted more than a decade. Caplan sent me images once the prints were out. “Maintaining confidentiality was very important,” Dr. Singh recalled. Otherwise, sellers will smell eager buyers and raise prices.
The first work I purchased in 2013 was ‘Fuji seen from Tokaido Kanaya.’ In 2014, 2015, and 2016, he purchased three of the best-known images from the series. He said that, all things being equal, the initial impression of a print is that it is likely to be of better quality, even though it may be damaged or faded. He said he spent a total of about $3 million constructing the set.
As Dr. Singh learned more about the artist, Hokusai's long career and dedication to his art also impressed collectors, especially his introspection. Although Hokusai had been sketching since he was 6 years old, he once said, “There is nothing noteworthy I did before I was 70.” If that statement was exaggerated, it was also prescient. In 1830, when he was 70 years old, the author embarked on 'The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji', which is considered the pinnacle of his creativity.
It also resonated with Dr. Singh. “He devoted his life to art,” the collector thought. “The idea is that we are born to perfect ourselves. It’s a very Hindu concept.”
By 2018, Dr. Singh had collected 41 prints. “The last five were the hardest to find,” he remembered. “I received my last card in January 2023.” It was the “Five Hundred Nahansa Sajaidang” (a reference to the legendary disciple of the Buddha). Here, a man and a woman wearing long robes were standing on the temple balcony admiring Mount Fuji.
“I achieved my goal.”
As moved as he was by the art, he believed investing in Hokusai would be good “financial diversification,” the professor said. After Christie's sold a print of “Great Wave Off Kanagawa” last year for $2.8 million, a record for the artist, Dr. Singh decided to put his equipment up for auction. (Christie's does not charge him the usual seller's fee.)
He entrusted his fingerprints to a trust. After the sale, the money goes into the trust. Dr. Singh can withdraw 6% of the trust value each year. The balance will grow tax-free and be donated to charity.
But whatever the financial consequences, in the opinion of Andreas Marks, author of “Hokusai: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” and curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, “the feat of putting it all together is extraordinary.”
[Update: On Tuesday, Dr. Singh’s collection sold at Christie’s for $3.6 million, with fees, to an unidentified buyer.]