Japonisme

After centuries of isolation from the West, Japan, constrained in 1854 by the fleet of the United States to establish commerical relations with Europe and America, found itself in direct contact with the Western metropolises, which became fascinated by that mysterious culture that had showed itself, officialy, at the Universal Exhibition in London in 1862. The Japanese articles (furniture, decorations, ceramics and daily objects) that were exhibited with this occasion, but also in Paris in 1867 and 1878, Viena in 1873 and in Philadelphia in 1876 conquered the Western taste through their exotic charm and synthetic lines that depicted elegant and stylized forms in such a way that "Japonisme" has had significant aesthetic and stylistic consequences on Western fashion, art and culture of the XIXth century. Actually, Japanese art has influenced literary works, theatre, paintings, sculptures and most of all decorative arts, contributing, at the end of the XIXth century to the birth of the Art Nouveau movement, that took its name from the furniture shop opened in Paris in 1895 by Siegfried Samuel Bing.

Utagawa Hiroshige - "Snow falling on a town"

In France, this influence has been called Japonisme, which started with the frenzy to collect Japanese art, particularly woodblock print art (ukiyo-e). The woodblock prints from Japan were among the first of Asia to strongly influence the West. The Japanese art, which for almost a millennium hadn't gone too far from the austerity of the Chinese tradition from which it came, found in the XVIIIth century an original field of specialization in the production of coloured woodprints representing scenes full of life from the daily existence of ordinary people, made with fantasy and technical rigor. These stamps, which were not so appreciated in Japan because they contrasted with the refinement of the tradition, got to Europe as packing paper for porcelains and other commercialized products.

Katsushika Hokusai - Mount Fuji with cherry trees in bloom

The French artist Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of the sketchbook Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer; the woodblocks had been used as packaging for a consignment of porcelain from Japan. In 1860 and 1861 reproductions (in black and white) of ukiyo-e were published in books on Japan. In 1861 Baudelaire wrote in a letter:“Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries. I’ve split them up among my friends.” 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. 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 a bijin (beautiful lady) in a woodblock print.

Utagawa Kunisada - from his 1852 series "Tale of Genji"

Genre painting and the wood-block print - a short history

In the Edo period, diversity and elegance in the fine arts was matched by the robust humour and virile self-confidence of the rising lower mercantile class. Anonymus craftsmen working on everyday items such as ceramics, textiles, farm implements, architecture, household furnishings, book illustration and printing catered to mass tastes. For ordinary people, peasants and townsmen alike, this was a vigorous artistic period. And it is this new urban and urbane culture that marks the most notable departure from previous eras. Although the Tokugawa had placed merchants beneath farmers and artisans in the new social hierarchy, this enterprising class nevertheless came increasingly to dominate life in the land. In cities and in towns, they created a vigorous commercial economy flourished; mass literacy was among the highest in the world; popular and satirical novels were extremely fashionable, and the printing business flourished.

Since the early sixteenth century, a favourite art-form among the rising bourgeoisie was genre-painting. These works featured a variety of popular recreations and amusements. Many such works provide tantalizing glimpses into the historical city with views of palaces and temples since burnt down. Artist were free to depict existing structures together with glorified versions of the present. On a simpler scale, scenes such as the anonymus Shijo-Kawara are the apotheosis of bourgeois collective self-portraiture. Bijinga or Pictures of Beauties showed elegant, beautiful women in leisurely pursuits; with meticulously recorded details of dress. Later versions revealed forms featuring the more down-market activities of lower grade prostitutes, or bath-house attendants working in the "water-trade", mizu-shbai. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, as the appeal of this kind of art increased, it began to be mass-produced. Urban life seemed at its most elegant and extravagant in the demi-monde of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka.

Suzuki Harunobu - The Tale of Genji

These 'floating world' pictures or uikyo-e, dominated both genre painting and the now world-famous Japanese wood-block prints.

In Edo, Hishikawa Moronobu and others began by producing black and white prints, hand-coloured in orange-red. Many of these were overtly and extravagantly erotic, and their style imitated the calligraphic character of the ink-brush line. By the early eighteenth century, a wider range of colours, including and attractive rose-red and a deep-toned black resembling lacquer, was added. A great many hand-coloured actor-prints of this type were now produced. In about 1745, a more elaborate and expansive technique of multiblock colour printing was used to produce limited editions of calendar prints.

The actor-prints featured the matinée idols of the time, the Kabuki actors. Prints announcing or celebrating particular performances, or portraying an actor in a certain role. Here was a medium for theatrical panache and irony. Eerie satire is the realm of Sharaku.

Toshusai Sharaku - Sakata Hangoro III As The Villian Fujikawa Mizuemon

He may have been a No actor; certainly his hardly flattering view of the more popular Kabuki style seems to have offended Kabuki actors, and his publisher dropped him after only ten brilliant months. Now figurative prints, including mythological heroes and actor-prints, became increasingly grotesque; the phenomenon also imbued the paintings of Rosetsu, Jakuchu and others with a sense of suppressed hysteria.

Little of this baroque exaggeration is found in the work of Katsuhika Hokusai (1760-1849) whose fame grew out of his numerous cartoons (manga) or humorous sketches. His landscape prints discovered vigorous new life in an ancient form. Like the great painters Taiga and Tanyu before him, Hokusai drew on a dazzling variety of sources, not the least among them Chinese illustrations, and was fired by extraordinary creative energy.

His famous views of Mount Fuji, so overexposed as to seem banal, remain nevertheless a synthesis of supreme draftmanship tinged with a remarkably humane view of the world he knows.

Katsushika Hokusai - View on a Fine Breezy Day

Encouraged by Hokusai's example, Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) perfected a new genre of travelogue prints, with numerous series such as The Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido Highway. Making ample use of chemical dyes newly introduced from the West, Hiroshige provided a more lyrical vision in which the poetry of mood is given memorable expression, as in the feeling of loneliness and quietude in the snow-covered pass at Kambara.

Ando Hiroshige - Snow at Kambara

Coming back to Europe, in the time of the first decades of the XIXth century, that artistic culture spread more and more in the West through the publication of picture books, through private collections and acquisitions of some museums that were just opening, or through sections dedicated to Japanese art in libraries and archives.

In England, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was the artist most enthusiastic about Japanese prints. But the vital centre of the Japanese culture myth remained Paris, fueled by at least two generations of writers (Edmond de Goncourt, Baudelaire, Zola) and artists, from Rousseau to Manet's circle of friends.

What interested the French impressionists the most about the Japanese graphics were the realism and the option for scenes of everyday and contemporary lives, for the simplification of the figurative composition, for flat surfaces and uniform colour, with no chiaroscuro, for the freshness and spontaneity of the images with daring compositional lines, which contrasted so much with the rigid academic canons of the West. Many started to collect these stamps and imitate them in their works, initiating a real fashion.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) attempted to recreate in his paintings the unconventional angles from these Japanese scenes and the sensual idealization of the feminine faces of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), who represented women, alone or in a group, getting ready to comb their hair or wash, surprised with intimate gestures from the time of arranging themselves.

Edgar Degas - Woman combing her hair

Kitagawa Utamaro, Bijin Combing Her Hair

Also, Degas, through a stratification of warm and pasty colours, managed to imitate the brightness of the backgrounds from those precious prints, using mica, a mineral powder the reflects the light. The decorative aspect of the Japanese style also influenced the American artist Mary Cassat, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and even the Czech Mucha, the British Beardsley, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.

The Japanese artists also reflect, through the realism of their subjects and through calligraphic and chromatic perfection of their works, a special way of life, in a spiritual and pantheistic communion with nature and the surrounding world, which was the most difficult aspect to perceive and assmiliate in the Western mentality and culture of the XIXth century.

The artist who, maybe, managed to capture better than the others that 'spiritual' aspect of nature was Claude Monet, whose search took different and various aspects. He, who had been named 'faithful rival of Hokusai', had made even since 1867 the painting Jardin à Sainte-Adresse (Garden at Sainte-Adresse), mostly

inspired for the plunging perspective of the composition from the work Saizado from the Gohyaku-rakanji Temple of Katsushika Hokusai, which was a part of the famous series Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji, series from about 1834.

In the 70's, Monet's house in Argenteuil was full of Japanese objects, fans and stamps, from which the artist had an entire collection, enriched during his life. In that atmosphere, in 1875, he painted the portrait of his lover, Camille in Japanese Costume, as a sort of parody to the Parisian fashion 'à la japonaise'.

The young and beautiful Camille, with a look in no way Oriental, wears a blonde wig and a red kimono with exquisite embroidery and seems to be having a coquettish fun, laughing and waving the fan (in the colours of the French flag), posing on a fan covered background.

At the same time, Monet had the ability to understand the deep power of suggestion due to the myriad forms of nature, as it can be seen, for example, in the representation of the sharp rocks of Port-Coton of the rock

from Belle-Île-en-Mer and the splendid evening of the Poplars, inspired by the images of Japanese artists

like Kunisada, Hokuju, Hiroshige and the great Hokusai.

Katsushika Hokusai - Hodogaya on the Tokaido Road

While painting Mount Kolsas from Norway, Monet wrote to Blanche Hoschedé in 1895: 'I am working at a view from Sandviken which resembles a Japanese village, then I will make a mountain which can be seen from everywhere, that gets me thinking of Fujiyama'. But the peak of Japanese influence on Monet is represented by the Garden at Giverny, which effectively reconstructed the exotic atmosphere and perspectives of the favourite prints made by Hiroshige and Hokusai, amidst the flowers in thousands of shades, the hidden paths, invaded by greenery, the weeping willows and the 'Japanese' bridge that curved above the lake with water lilies. The imagination of Monet excedeed the canvas, to become real space.