Nestled within the permanent collection of French Impressionist paintings at NGV International, for the first time, the work of Japanese artists of the nineteenth century take centre stage to contextualise the enormous influence of Japan on the evolution of European art and artists of the period.
‘Japonisme’, the term coined by the art critic Philippe Burty in 1872, refers to the fascination for Japanese art and culture that swept across Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century. After more than two hundred years of self-imposed isolation from the West, Japan was forced by the United States to open its borders to international trade in 1854. This resulted in an influx of Japanese commodities into Europe and America and triggered a revolution in Western art and design. The classic period of Japonisme extended from the late 1850s to the 1890s and was associated with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Europe, and the Aesthetic movement in England. Early practitioners of Japonisme copied exotic motifs across media before gradually engaging more deeply with Japanese art, adopting innovative compositional devices, exploring new subject matter and embracing Japanese art’s profound respect for hand manufacture, and the decorative arts. Out of this arose Art Nouveau, a radical rethinking of design across all media, which flourished until the outbreak of the First World War and marked the beginnings of modern art and abstraction.
Following Japan’s opening up of trade with the West, an influx of goods began arriving in Europe. These goods covered the spectrum of Japanese art and culture, including fans, kimonos, silks, ivories, ceramics, lacquer, bronzes, furniture and woodblock prints. Among the prints arriving were many by the great masters of the so-called ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, school of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro and Utagawa Hiroshige whose works were to become enormously influential upon European artists and designers.
From the late 1850s woodblock prints became available in Paris through a variety of outlets, including curiosity shops, tea warehouses – at which imported produce was said to have arrived wrapped in prints, and larger stores incorporating dedicated departments of Asian artworks. La Porte Chinoise at 36 rue Vivienne was one such shop that specialised in selling Chinese and Japanese works and its holdings of woodblock prints, including volumes of Hokusai’s Manga (small bound volumes of printed sketches), attracted many artists and collectors.
Some of the earliest French collectors of Japanese art were leading cultural figures, including the writers Edmond de Goncourt and Emile Zola, art critics Philippe Burty and Théodore Duret, and the artists James McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. These cultural proponents saw Japanese art as offering fresh inspiration and a new artistic approach that had the potential to free Western art, both the fine and decorative, from the strictures of long-established, historical conventions derived from a Classical foundation. Along with these early Japonistes, Vincent van Gogh was also a voracious collector of Japanese woodblock prints whose unique design aesthetics and treatment of colour had a profound effect upon his art.
The popularity of Japanese colour woodblock prints in Paris promoted interest in the print as an original art form and inspired a surge of interest in colour printmaking during the 1890s. Colour lithography was the favoured medium adopted by many artists of this period to create colourful posters, albums of prints, illustrated theatre playbills and small journals, including original prints. The formal qualities of Japanese art were reflected in the asymmetrical compositions, unusual viewpoints, decorative patterning and flat, unmodulated colours of many of the period’s most innovative prints. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and prints, with their emphatic two-dimensionality, use of silhouette and vibrant colour owe much of their radicality to Japanese art. Pierre Bonnard, one of the group of young artists who called themselves the Nabis (Hebrew for prophets), was nicknamed le Nabi très Japonard (the ultra Japanese Nabi). His colour lithographs of the 1890s were highly inventive in their assimilation of Japanese influences, extending beyond compositional devices to also include an approach to subject matter as seen in his series Some Aspects of Parisian Life, 1899 and gifted to the NGV by the Felton Bequest. This important album of twelve prints presents incidental views of the modern city of Paris – corners of buildings, rainy street scenes at night – that reflect the anecdotal scenes of daily life captured in such woodblock series as Hiroshige’s One hundred famous views of Edo, 1856–58. Teaching the dog, 1893, by Ker-Xavier Roussel, another of the Nabi artists, shows how the abrupt cropping of the foreground figure, the silhouetted forms of the women, the frieze of trees and the strong verticality of the composition introduces a wholly new approach to the spatial treatment of form and narrative.
Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints often depicted the pleasurable diversions available to newly prosperous Japanese urban middle-classes, including scenes of the licensed red-light districts and the dramatic performances of Kabuki theatre. These images of the urban environment encouraged Western artists to explore the burgeoning late nineteenth-century urban world of great metropolises such as Paris, London and New York. Artists depicted the life of the city and its modern streetscapes in a manner unprecedented in the canons of Western academic art. Gifted by the Felton Bequest, Camille Pissarro’s painting of the Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather, 1897, is one of a series of fourteen views looking east along the broad avenue that he painted between 10 February and 17 April 1897. These views show the wide thoroughfare created by the government official Baron Haussman’s remodelling of the centre of Paris from the 1860s onwards, eliminating the narrow, winding streets of the medieval city. The depiction of a bustling crowd strolling through the streetscape owes much to Japanese scenes of fashionable urban life, as does the elevated viewpoint that creates the impression that we are leaning out into the street. This elevated viewpoint can also be seen in Hiroshige’s woodblock print of Sakurajima, Ōsuma province, 1853–1856, gifted to the NGV by the Felton Bequest, which captures a rural landscape from an unusually high vantage point, quite literally from a bird’s eye perspective.
The Art Nouveau style that developed from the late 1880s is widely recognised as the beginnings of modernism, through its self-conscious break with European design styles of the past. Inspired by Japanese art, Art Nouveau artists and designers drew enormous inspiration from nature, pursuing formal innovation by emulating shapes, colours and textures from the plant and animal worlds. The radicalness of the style is seen in the full internalisation of Japanese aesthetics, beyond the literal copying of motifs and techniques, enabling artists to give expression to something that was bold, modern and completely of its own place and time. Supported by the NGVWA, the Wisteria, table lamp, 1903–1905, by Tiffany Studios is a supreme example of Art Nouveau design directly inspired by Japanese art. The dripping panicles of the shade, crafted from more than 2,000 pieces of hand-worked glass, form a canopy of lush, cascading, wisteria blossom in a naturalistic palette of rich cobalt, ultramarine, soft lavender and pearly white. It evokes a deep sense of naturalism and pays homage to the Japanese reverence for nature, in particular the wisteria flower, which informed Japanese art so deeply. The essence of the natural world pervades every aspect of the lamp’s design and its execution is a demonstration of the mastery of materials and fine hand manufacture. The mirror of Japanese art cast the gaze of Western artists back on to their own traditions, encouraging them to seek innovation and renewal, and leading them to the brink of modernity.
Amanda Dunsmore is Senior Curator, International Decorative Arts and Antiquities. Cathy Leahy is Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings.
This essay was commissioned for NGV Magazine, Issue 30 | Sep–Oct 2021.