Japonisme: The East-West Renaissance That Transformed Art & Visual Culture
Words by Camila Ponce Hernandez
The intrigue of the Japanese artistic style
Japanese artists often left the middle ground of their compositions empty, while objects in the foreground were oftentimes enlarged. They regularly excluded the horizon too, or abruptly cropped the elements of the picture at the edge. This approach to structure and focal point placement greatly encouraged Western artists to re-engineer the composition of their pieces.
In 1880, the French novelist Emile Zola observed that any artist worth his salt studied Japanese prints, “which everyone has nowadays”. Indeed, some artists, including Claude Monet and James McNeill Whistler, had been collecting ‘ukiyo-e’ (pictures of the floating world) prints for years. Already by 1872, the French term ‘Japonisme’ had been coined, to describe the influence of Japanese art and design on Western culture, especially the visual arts.
Self-coined ‘Nabis’ or ‘prophets’ of a new style of art such as Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard relied upon the ethereal viewpoints of ukiyo-e printmakers for inspirations. Paul Gauguin went as far as to adapt the nationally deep-rooted artistic approach of Japanese wood-cutting to provide an abstract edge to his otherwise forward-looking pieces.
Pierre Bonnard, ‘Stork and four frogs’ (1889)
Pierre Bonnard, ‘Crépuscule’ (1892)
Paul Gauguin ‘Delightful Land’ (1893–94)
Van Gogh’s encounters with Japanese art
“And we wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful, and it makes us return to nature, despite our education and our work in a world of convention.” (Vincent to his brother Theo, September 1888)
Vincent bought his first stack of Japanese woodcuts in Antwerp and pinned them to the wall of his room. He described the city to his brother with these exotic images in mind as “diverting,” bordered by “gnarled thorn branches” (September 1885). Upon moving to Paris with his brother, he began to see these prints as an artistic example and thought they were equal to the great masterpieces of Western art history
Vincent adopted Japanese visual inventions into his own work, finding a liking to the unusual spatial effects, the expanses of strong colour, the incorporation of the mundane, and the heightened detail of the natural especially pleasing to him. To Vincent, the Japanese canvas was a place of utter exoticism, joy, and vibrancy. Like Gauguin, he believed that artists should explore the southernmost, primitive regions of the world in search of new perspectives and horizons. This, he maintained, would help them take art to a more elevated field of artistic innovation.
Vincent van Gogh, ‘The Courtesan (after Eisen)’ (1887)
Vincent van Gogh, ‘Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige)’, (1887)
Vincent van Gogh, ‘Portrait of Julien Tanguy’, (1887)
Formulating ‘japonaiseries’ in other mediums: Does Japonisme erase Japan’s reality?
In literary incarnations of Japonisme, Japanese merchandise is often placed between public and domestic spheres; whether it be travel narratives, poetry or novels, these texts brought the predominantly interlocking issues of masculinity and femininity back to a Japan of, as Wilde once stated, “pure invention.”
As the pursuit for seeking a new language in painting developed further, so was a growing curiosity for this ‘newly discovered’ culture in the field of photography. E A Hornel, a painter-turned-photographer in the 19th century, used his camera’s eye to access people, places and networks. As a westerner abroad experiencing ‘the other’, Hornel attempted to capture the nuance of identity among his subjects, particularly the photographs he took in Japan. However, the glaringly problematic nature of this was Hornel’s aim to find a land of stereotypical Japanese motifs without necessarily reflecting the rapidly modernising reality. Even the girls in Kirkcudbright were ‘othered’ by him to fit an innocent, rural ideal.
A Japanese woman playing a shamisen, attributed to Tamamura Kozaburo, before 1921.
E A Hornel, ‘A Japanese woman playing a shamisen’, (c. 1921–25)
Hence, as with other foreign-influenced movements that originated within the sphere of a specific art form, Japonisme soon entered the public domain and was adopted as a favourite style – yet there seems to have been more to this than what literally meets the eye. Though the distinctive qualities of Japanese art offered striking, new approaches to modern artists developing alternatives to a Western tradition of naturalistic representation, some studies seemed superficially constructed and perhaps even propagated stereotypical ideas unintentionally.
It was almost a century before the appearance of the Neo-Japonisme/New Japonisme art movements. For instance, in the 1980s, the enthusiasm for manga and Japanese animation culture among younger generations led to a renewed fascination for Japan’s signature visual arts. The delight and ‘fandom’ increase for the cult of “kawaii”, as well as the work of contemporary artists like Murakami Takashi drawing on the roots of tradition to create unique artwork, have given rise to present-day forms of “Japonismes.”
