> The Waves at the Art Institute aren't their most iconic, popular pieces; that honor probably goes to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon.
Well, there's only one Sunday Afternoon, but if you have a few thousand dollars, you, too, can own an original Waves, since there's no such thing as "the" original when you're talking about collecting prints.
Much like there isn't a "one" Warhol soup can painting. These artists' works were infinitely replicable even in their own day. That's why in the Japanese art world, prints produced in the artist's lifetime are all considered original because they would've all been made by the same hand, or an assistant's.
EDIT: After googling, it appears that it's estimated 8,000 copies of the Great Wave were made by Hokusai, but that few of them still exist. That's surprising to me, honestly. One recently sold for $2.7 million, apparently, and I couldn't believe that search result. My mistake!
EDIT 2: That being said, the British Museum alone owns three original Great Wave copies.
Right, the question here is whether the Wave itself is among the world's most famous works of art; the answer seems pretty clearly to be "yes". I threw the Seurat thing in as sort of a preemptive rebuttal to the idea that the Art Institute would hype up the Waves just because it has them. :)
There's a large number of bootleg Hokusai ripoffs - back in the early 1800s there were woodblock shops turning out near-exact copies, and some museums have discovered their prints are knockoffs.
Well, there's only one Sunday Afternoon, but if you have a few thousand dollars, you, too, can own an original Waves, since there's no such thing as "the" original when you're talking about collecting prints.
Much like there isn't a "one" Warhol soup can painting. These artists' works were infinitely replicable even in their own day. That's why in the Japanese art world, prints produced in the artist's lifetime are all considered original because they would've all been made by the same hand, or an assistant's.
EDIT: After googling, it appears that it's estimated 8,000 copies of the Great Wave were made by Hokusai, but that few of them still exist. That's surprising to me, honestly. One recently sold for $2.7 million, apparently, and I couldn't believe that search result. My mistake!
EDIT 2: That being said, the British Museum alone owns three original Great Wave copies.