Japonism

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph poster of 1892

Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term, which is also used in English, is a term for the influence of the arts of Japan on those of the West. The word was first used by Jules Claretie in his book L'Art Francais en 1872 published in that year.^[1] Japonaiserie describes a lower level of this meeting of civilizations. Works arising from the direct transfer of principles of Japanese art on Western, especially by French artists, are called japonesque.

From the 1860s, Ukiyo-e, Japanese wood-block prints, became a source of inspiration for Art Nouveau, cubism and many European impressionist painters in France and the rest of the West. They were especially affected by the lack of perspective and shadow, the flat areas of strong colour, the compositional freedom in placing the subject off-centre, with mostly low diagonal axes to the background.

1 History
2 Artists and movements
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

Cover of the French magazine le Japon artistique (1888) showing one of Hokusai's views on Mount Fuji.

During the Kaei era (1848 – 1854), many foreign merchant ships came to Japan. Following the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography and printing techniques and in turn, many Japanese ukiyo-e prints and other artworks came to Europe and America and soon gained popularity.

Japonism started with the frenzy to collect Japanese art, particularly print art (ukiyo-e), of which the first samples were to be seen in Paris. About 1856, the French artist Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of Hokusai’s Manga sketchbook prints at the shop of his printer; they had been used as packaging for a consignment of porcelain. In 1860 and 1861 reproductions (in black and white) of ukiyo-e were published in books on Japan. Baudelaire wrote in a letter in 1861:" Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries. I've split them up among my friends..", and the following year La Porte Chinoise, a shop selling various Japanese goods including prints, opened in the Rue de Rivoli, the most fashionable shopping street in Paris.^[1]In 1871 Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a one-act opera, La princesse jaune to a libretto by Louis Gallet, in which a Dutch girl is jealous of her artist friend's fixation on an ukiyo-e woodblock print.

At first, despite Braquemond's initial contact with one of the classic masterpieces of ukiyo-e, most of the prints reaching the West were by contemporary Japanese artists of the 1860s and 1870s, and it took some time for Western taste to access and appreciate the greater masters of older generations.

Van Gogh the blooming plumtree (after Hiroshige), 1887.

At the same time, many American intellectuals maintained that Edo prints were a vulgar art form, unique to the period and distinct from the refined, religious, national heritage of Japan known as Yamato-e (大和絵, pictures from the Yamato period, e.g. Zen masters Sesshu and Shubun).

French collectors, writers, and art critics undertook many voyages to Japan in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to the publication of articles about Japanese aesthetics and the increased distribution of prints in Europe, especially in France. Among them, the liberal economist Henri Cernuschi the critic Theodore Duret (both in 1871 – 1872), and the British collector William Anderson, who lived for some years in Edo and taught medicine. (Anderson's collection has been acquired by the British Museum.) Several Japanese art dealers subsequently resided in Paris, such as Tadamasa Hayashi and Jijima Hanjuro. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 presented many pieces of Japanese art.

[edit] Artists and movements

Van Gogh - La courtisane (after Eisen), 1887.

Japanese artists who had a great influence included Utamaro and Hokusai. Curiously, while Japanese art was becoming popular in Europe, at the same time, the bunmeikaika (文明開化, Westernization) led to a loss in prestige for the prints in Japan.

Artists who were influenced by Japanese art include Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, Degas, Renoir, James McNeill Whistler (Rose and silver: La princesse du pays de porcelaine, 1863-64), Monet, van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gaugin,Klimt, and many others.

Although works in all media were influenced, printmaking was not surprisingly particularly affected, although lithography not woodcut was the most popular medium. The prints and posters of Toulouse-Lautrec can hardly be imagined without the Japanese influence. Not until Félix Vallotton and Paul Gaugin was woodcut itself much used for japonesque works, and then mostly in black and white.

Whistler was important in introducing England to Japanese art. Paris was the acknowledged center of all things Japanese and Whistler acquired a good collection during his years there.

Several of van Goghs's paintings imitate ukiyo-e in style and in motif. For example, Le Père Tanguy, the portrait of the proprietor of an art supply shop, shows six different ukiyo-e in the background scene. He painted The Courtesan in 1887 after finding an ukiyo-e by Kesai Eisen on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustré in 1886. At this time, in Antwerp, he was already collecting Japanese prints.

In terms of music, one can say that Giacomo Puccini used Japonism in his famous Madama Butterfly. Gilbert and Sullivan's famous operetta "The Mikado" was inspired by the Japanese exhibition in Knightsbridge, London.

There were many characteristics of Japanese art that influenced these artists. In the Japonisme stage, they were more interested in the asymmetry and irregularity of Japanese art. Japanese art consisted of off centered arrangements with no perspective, light with no shadows and vibrant colors on plane surfaces. These elements were in direct contrast to Roman-Greco art and were embraced by 19th Century artists, who believed they freed the Western artistic mentality from academic conventions.

Ukiyo-e, with their curved lines, patterned surfaces and contrasting voids, and flatness of their picture-plane, also inspired Art Nouveau. Some line and curve patterns became graphic clichés that were later found in works of artists from all parts of the world. These forms and flat blocks of color were the precursors to abstract art in modernism.