Japonism - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

term, was first used in 1872 by Jules Claretie in his book L'Art Francais en 1872 and by Philippe Burty (1830–1890) in Japanisme III. La Renaissance Literaire et Artistique in the same year. Japanism might be considered a general term for the influence of the arts of Japan

Japanese art

Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...

on those of the West, whereas in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

Japonisme is applied to such influence and is in addition the name of a specfic French style. In England objects influenced by japanism have been termed Anglo-Japanese, from as early as 1851, according to Widar Halen in Christopher Dresser, 1990, p.33.

From the 1860s, ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e

' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

, Japanese wood-block prints, became a source of inspiration for many European impressionist painters

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

in France and elsewhere, and eventually for Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

and Cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

. Artists were especially affected by the lack of perspective and shadow, the flat areas of strong color, the compositional freedom in placing the subject off-centre, with mostly a low diagonal axis to the background. Unlike other varieties of Orientalism

Orientalism

Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...

, Japonism mostly involved Western artists using elements of Eastern styles in works showing their own culture; if only because of the difficulty of travel, there were relatively few artists attempting Eastern scenes in a Western style.

17th century precedents

Since the later 17th century, Japanese ceramics exported from Arita

Arita, Saga

is a town located in Nishimatsuura District, Saga, Japan. It is known for producing Arita porcelain, one of the traditional handicrafts of Japan. It also holds the largest ceramic fair in Western Japan, the Arita Ceramic Fair...

had already been quite influential in Europe, and to a lesser extent, Japanese lacquer. Japanese blue and white porcelain was exported and reproduced in Europe, as well as some very characteristic Japanese porcelain styles such as the Kakiemon
Kakiemon
Kakiemon wares were produced at the factories of Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan from the mid-17th century, with much in common with the Chinese "Famille Verte" style...

style, which was widely reproduced throughout Europe, notably at the Meissen manufactory

Meissen porcelain

Meissen porcelain or Meissen china is the first European hard-paste porcelain that was developed from 1708 by Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. After his death that October, Johann Friedrich Böttger, continued his work and brought porcelain to the market...

in Germany, or the Chantilly manufactory

Chantilly porcelain

Chantilly porcelain is French soft-paste porcelain produced between 1730 and 1800 by the manufactory of Chantilly in Oise, France.-Foundation:...

in France. In the 18th century a handful of Japanese plants were in Dutch and English gardens, but Japanese garden

Japanese garden

, that is, gardens in traditional Japanese style, can be found at private homes, in neighborhood or city parks, and at historical landmarks such as Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and old castles....

style remained as unknown in Europe as Japanese textiles or woodblock prints.

19th century re-opening

During the Kaei era (1848 – 1854), after more than 200 years of seclusion

Sakoku

was the foreign relations policy of Japan under which no foreigner could enter nor could any Japanese leave the country on penalty of death. The policy was enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu through a number of edicts and policies from 1633–39 and remained in effect until...

, foreign merchant ships of various nationalities again began to visit Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration

Meiji Restoration

The , also known as the Meiji Ishin, Revolution, Reform or Renewal, was a chain of events that restored imperial rule to Japan in 1868...

in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography and printing techniques. In turn, many Japanese ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e

' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

prints and ceramics, followed in time by Japanese textiles, bronzes and cloisonné enamels and other arts came to Europe and America and soon gained popularity.

Japonism started with the frenzy to collect Japanese art, particularly print art called ukiyo-e of which some of the first samples were to be seen in Paris. About 1856, the French artist Félix Bracquemond

Felix Bracquemond

Félix Henri Bracquemond was a French painter and etcher.Félix Bracquemond was born in Paris. He was trained in early youth as a trade lithographer, until Guichard, a pupil of Ingres, took him to his studio. His portrait of his grandmother, painted by him at the age of nineteen, attracted Théophile...

first came across a copy of the sketch book Hokusai Manga
Hokusai Manga
The is a collection of sketches of various subjects by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Subjects of the sketches include landscapes, flora and fauna, everyday life and the supernatural. The word manga in the title does not refer to the contemporary story-telling manga, as the sketches in the work are...

at the workshop 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 about 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

Rue de Rivoli, Paris

Rue de Rivoli is one of the most famous streets of Paris, a commercial street whose shops include the most fashionable names in the world. It bears the name of Napoleon's early victory against the Austrian army, at the battle of Rivoli, fought January 14 and 15, 1797...

, the most fashionable shopping street in Paris. In 1871 Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

wrote a one-act opera, La princesse jaune
La princesse jaune
La princesse jaune is an opéra comique in one act and five scenes by composer Camille Saint-Saëns to a French libretto by Louis Gallet. The opera premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 12 June 1872....

to a libretto by Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet was an inexhaustible French writer of operatic libretti, plays, romances, memoirs, pamphlets, and innumerable articles, who is remembered above all for his adaptations of fiction—and Scripture— to provide librettos of cantatas and opera, notably by composers Georges...

, in which a Dutch girl is jealous of her artist friend's fixation on an ukiyo-e woodblock print.

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.

At the same time, many American

Visual arts of the United States

American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement,...

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

Yamato-e

Yamato-e is a style of Japanese painting inspired by Tang Dynasty paintings and developed in the late Heian period. It is considered the classical Japanese style...

(大和絵, pictures from the Yamato period, e.g. those of Zen masters Sesshū

Sesshu Toyo

was the most prominent Japanese master of ink and wash painting from the middle Muromachi period. He was born into the samurai Oda family , then brought up and educated to become a Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest...

and Shūbun).

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 Edo era prints in Europe, especially in France

France

. Among them, the liberal economist Henri Cernuschi

Henri Cernuschi

Henri Cernuschi , was a major French banker, economist and Asian art collector, who started off as an Italian politician in 1848-1850....

and the critic Theodore Duret

Théodore Duret

Théodore Duret was a French journalist, author and art critic. He was one of the first advocates of impressionism, and many of his writings are devoted to explaining to the 19th century public how the new trends in painting were a continuation of traditions in western painting.- References...

(both in 1871 – 1872). Earlier, in England, the official Japanese section at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, was prepared by Sir Rutherford Alcock (British Minister in Edo from 1859) and included his own collection. This is considered one of the most important events in the history of Japanese art in the West.(W.Halen.p.34) The English botanist, designer and theorist Christopher Dresser

Christopher Dresser

Christopher Dresser was an English designer and design theorist, now widely known as one of the first and most important, independent, designers and was a pivotal figure in the Aesthetic Movement, and a major contributor to the allied Anglo-Japanese branch of the Movement; both originated in...

(1834-1904) bought items from this display and was one of the few designers who visited Japan (in 1876 as a guest of the Japanese nation) and who consistently promoted Japanese art throughout his long career. Several Japanese art dealers subsequently resided in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, such as Tadamasa Hayashi

Tadamasa Hayashi

was a Japanese art dealer who introduced traditional Japanese art such as ukiyo-e to Europe.Tadamasa was born to a family of Physician the Nagasaki family...

and Iijima Hanjuro. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878

Exposition Universelle (1878)

The third Paris World's Fair, called an Exposition Universelle in French, was held from 1 May through to 10 November 1878. It celebrated the recovery of France after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.-Construction:...

presented many pieces of Japanese art.

Artists and movements

Japanese artists who had a great influence included Utamaro

Utamaro

was a Japanese printmaker and painter, who is considered one of the greatest artists of woodblock prints . His name was romanized as Outamaro. He is known especially for his masterfully composed studies of women, known as bijinga...

and Hokusai

Hokusai

was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. He was influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting...

. While Japanese art was becoming popular in Europe, the bunmeikaika (文明開化, "Westernization") led to a loss in prestige for the prints in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

.

Artists who were influenced by Japanese art include: Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator....

, Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...

, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...

, Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...

, Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...

, Renoir, James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...

(Rose and silver: La princesse du pays de porcelaine, 1863-64), Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

, Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

, Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...

, Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Bertha Lum, Will Bradley

Will Bradley

Wilbur Schwictenberg was an American trombonist and bandleader who also performed under the name Will Bradley...

, Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....

, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...

, the sisters Frances

Frances MacDonald

Frances MacDonald was a Scottish artist whose design work was a prominent feature of the "Glasgow Style" during the 1890s.The sister of better known artist Margaret MacDonald, she was born near at Tipton, near Wolverhampton, and moved to Glasgow with her family in 1890...

and Margaret Macdonald

Margaret MacDonald (artist)

Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh was a Scottish artist whose design work became one of the defining features of the "Glasgow Style" during the 1890s....

, as well as architects Edward W.Godwin, Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...

, Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, watercolourist and artist. He was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had a considerable influence on European design...

and Stanford White

Stanford White

Stanford White was an American architect and partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, the frontrunner among Beaux-Arts firms. He designed a long series of houses for the rich and the very rich, and various public, institutional, and religious buildings, some of which can be found...

, and ceramicists Edmond Lachenal

Edmond Lachenal

Edmond Lachenal was a French potter.Edmond Lachenal had two sons, Jean-Jacques Lachenal and Raoul Lachenal who succeeded him as potters. Edmond Lachenal was one of the pivotal figures in the development and creation of Art Nouveau in ceramics, and his works are comparable in influence and...

and Taxile Doat

Taxile Doat

Taxile Doat was a French potter who is primarily known for his experimentation with high-fired porcelain and stoneware using the pâte-sur-pâte technique. His book on these techniques Grand Feu Ceramics was published in 1905 and helped spread his discoveries internationally...

. Some artists, such as Georges Ferdinand Bigot

Georges Ferdinand Bigot

Georges Ferdinand Bigot was a French cartoonist, illustrator and artist. Although almost unknown in his native country, Bigot is famous in Japan for his satirical cartoons, which depict life in Meiji period Japan.-Biography:...

, moved to Japan because of their fascination with Japanese art.

Although works in all media were influenced, printmaking

Printmaking

Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...

was not affected, although lithography

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...

, not woodcut

Woodcut

Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

, was the most popular medium. The prints and posters of Toulouse-Lautrec can hardly be imagined without the Japanese influence. Not until Félix Vallotton

Félix Vallotton

Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut.-Life and work:...

and Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

was woodcut itself much used for japonesque works, and then mostly in black and white.

Whistler has been considered important in introducing England to Japanese art in the same way as Paris has been considered the center of all things Japanese (Whistler acquired a good collection during his years there before coming to England in 1859). This may be the case in the context of Fine Art, but in England the study and purchase of Japanese art had begun as early as 1852. An essential element of Japanese art, the use of conventional or flat decoration (and lack of perspective, see above) was in fact one of the propositions in Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament 1856. Decorative Art, if not Fine Art, in England when influenced by the principles derived from arts of Japan and is referred to as Anglo-Japanese in style, and distinct from the Japonisme of France.

Several of Van Gogh'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.

Japonism also had an effect on music. In 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan

Gilbert and Sullivan

Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...

's comic opera The Mikado
The Mikado
The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, their ninth of fourteen operatic collaborations...

possibly inspired by the Japanese Native Village exhibition

Japanese Village, Knightsbridge

The Japanese Village in Knightsbridge, London, was a late Victorian era exhibition of Japanese culture located in Humphreys' Hall, which took place from January 1885 until June 1887.-Description:...

in Knightsbridge, London, although as the exhibition did not open until after the opera was already in rehearsal. This could have been confused with the earlier Japanese village which had been proposed in 1873 following the International Exhibition in Vienna that year, and built at Alexandra Palace in North London, by 1875. Sullivan used a version of the song, "Ton-yare Bushi" by Ômura Masujiro in The Mikado. Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...

also made use of the same tune in his opera Madama Butterfly
Madama Butterfly
Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Puccini based his opera in part on the short story "Madame Butterfly" by John Luther Long, which was dramatized by David Belasco...

in 1904.

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

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.

Japonism also involved the adoption of Japanese elements or style across all the applied arts, from furniture, textiles, jewellery to graphic design.

Recent scholarship has shown that the influence of Japanese visual art on early Modernist experiments in Western literature

Modernist literature

Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...

was also highly significant. Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

began his long engagement with East Asian culture in 1909 via viewings of Ukiyo-e prints

Ukiyo-e

' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

in the company of the curator Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

Robert Laurence Binyon was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. His most famous work, For the Fallen, is well known for being used in Remembrance Sunday services....

at London's British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

, giving rise to the pronounced Imagist

Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...

tendency to offer poetic visions of Japan via ekphrastic descriptions of such artworks. This tendency is most obvious in the work of poets of the Imagist movement

Imagism

such as Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...

, John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher was an Imagist poet and author. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a socially prominent family. After attending Phillips Academy, Andover Fletcher went on to Harvard University from 1903 to 1907, when he dropped out shortly after his father's death.Fletcher lived in...

, and Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.- Personal life:...

External links

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17th century precedents

19th century re-opening

Artists and movements

See also

External links