Japonism

JAPONISTE BOWL

Rare silver plated bowl in the Japoniste taste, in hand raised copper, with fish, sea-horse and seaweed handles, signed 'BACILLAR'

Height 0.140, Width 0.500, Depth 0.420

Price £675.00 (J2)

WHISTLER PRINT

Beautiful framed 'Japoniste' print, in original oak frame with gilt inner slip frame, 'Symphony in White, No.2: The Little White Girl' by James McNeill Whistler

Height 0.460, Width 0.320

Price £365.00 (J1)

Japonism (also in French Japonisme and Japonaiserie) is the influence of Japanese art on Western, primarily French, artists. The art that originated from this influence is called japonesque.
While 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 (pictures from the Yamato period, e.g. Zen masters Sesshu and Shubun), ukiyo-e, Japanese wood-block prints, became a source of inspiration for Art Nouveau, cubism and many European impressionist painters in France.

History

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 (ukiyoe), 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 sketchbooks in a Paris studio. The frenzy for all things Japanese was immediate. 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 ukiyoe woodblock print. 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.

Artists and movements

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 (Westernization) led to a loss in prestige for the prints in Japan.

Artists who were influenced by Japanese art were van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, James McNeill Whistler (Rose and silver: La princesse du pays de porcelaine, 1863-64), Camille Pissarro, Klimt, and many others. Whistler was very instrumental in introducing England to Japanese art. Paris was the acknowledged center of all things Japanese and Whistler spent many years there collecting Japanese art. 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 Courtisan 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 stamps. In terms of music, one can say that Giacomo Puccini used Japonism, as he showed in his famous Madama Butterfly. 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, 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.