The Guardian: Melbourne row over art ‘porn’:
‘Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.
The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.
Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries — more info and pictures here. (There’s a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)
He coined the term ‘Manga’ to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre ‘tentacle porn’ subgenre of anime?