For decades, if you wanted to talk about Japanese prints, the conversation usually began and ended with Hokusai’s Great Wave. That may be starting to change.
This September, Christie’s will begin selling more than 600 prints from the collection of Alan Medaugh, an American businessman who spent half a century chasing the finest impressions he could find by Utagawa Hiroshige, Hokusai’s great rival and one of the towering figures of Japanese printmaking. Specialists say the collection ranks among the finest ever assembled. The first auction, on September 15 in New York, will include more than 180 prints. The timing might be ideal.
The market for Japanese prints has quietly become one of the auction world’s success stories. Hokusai has led the charge, with exceptional impressions of The Great Wave regularly smashing expectations. Last year, Sotheby’s sold one from the Okada Museum collection for $2.8 million—nearly three times its high estimate—as part of an $88 million sale that underscored collectors’ appetite for top-tier Japanese material.
Now Christie’s believes Hiroshige is having a moment of his own. “Over the past six or seven years, we have regularly raised our estimates,” Takaaki Murakami, Christie’s head of Japanese and Korean Art, told ARTnews. “Yet even as the estimates are growing, when we take an average of all our results, lots have doubled their low estimates over this period.”
Murakami said the market has become noticeably more international, with younger collectors, the holy grail among art dealers and auction houses, entering the category and demand spreading well beyond Japan. In his view, the best Hiroshige prints remain undervalued when compared with Hokusai.
That is precisely the kind of print Medaugh spent more than half his life pursuing. He bought his first Hiroshige while visiting Japan with his wife shortly after they were married. At the time, he thought he’d simply found an attractive print. Only later did he begin to notice something else: one impression looked a little sharper than another. One had richer color. Another preserved details that had disappeared. The hunt was on.
Over the next 50 years, Medaugh made more than two dozen trips to Japan, haunted museums, read everything he could find and slowly refined his eye. Instead of buying more prints, he often bought more books. By the end, he had assembled roughly 700 Hiroshige works, always chasing the earliest impressions in the best condition.
“I think it actually was seeing the different moods he could create with color,” Medaugh said. “When you see a really fresh print… there are some that have been real survivors.”
That obsession might sound on the esoteric side, but it sits at the heart of today’s market. Japanese woodblock prints were produced from carved blocks that gradually wore down. The earliest impressions preserve crisper lines, subtler gradations of color and details that often disappear after hundreds of additional printings. For serious collectors, those differences can mean the difference between a good print and a great one. They can also mean a dramatically different price.
Hiroshige’s reputation has also grown outside the auction room. His One Hundred Famous Views of Edo inspired artists from Van Gogh to Monet, and last year Takashi Murakami devoted a major Gagosian exhibition to studying the series, describing it as a path back to the origins of modern painting.
Medaugh turns 83 this month, and he said the decision to sell wasn’t driven by the market alone. “I don’t want some guy winding up in the estate wondering what to do with these things,” he said. Better, he figured, to be an active part in find the next custodians. After all, many of the prints have already passed through a long chain of owners over nearly two centuries.
As for what he’ll do with the proceeds? The retired financier hasn’t decided yet. Although he admits he may start “another small collection.”
