From East to West The Influence of Japanese Art on Western Movements

Japonisme is a French term coined by French art critic and collector Philippe Burty in 1872 to describe the popularity and influence of Japanese art in nineteenth-century Europe. The French art historian Gabriel P. Weisberg was particularly drawn to Japanese art because its seclusion “appealed to their sense of exclusivity. They saw strength but restraint in the Japanese and were driven to combine those elements with French tradition and make something new.”

“Japanese art is important as a teacher. From it, we once again learn to feel clearly how far we have strayed from nature’s true designs through the persistent imitation of fixed models; we learn how necessary it is to draw from the source; how the human spirit is able to absorb a wealth of magnificent, naive beauty from the organic forms of nature in place of pedantic, decrepit rigidity of form” — Julius Lessing, Report from the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1878.

Japan was a mystery to the world for over two hundred years. The small country closed its borders in 1635 under the Sakoku policy (literally meaning “closed country”) enacted by Japan’s feudal military government - Tokugawa shogunate, known in Japan as the Edo shogunate – at the time. This policy was designed to halt colonial influence on their way of life, so relations and trade were limited, almost all foreign nationals were prevented from entering Japan, and regular Japanese people were forbidden from leaving the country under penalty of death. As a result, Japan’s way of life was a complete mystery to the rest of the world.

After William II of the Netherlands unsuccessful tried to convince Japan to end their self-imposed isolation in 1844, The Perry Expedition, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, was launched in 1853. It aimed to convince Japan to reopen its borders and engage with American trade. Known in Japan as Arrival of the Black Ships (黒船来航 , kurofune raikō, the name they gave to Western ships arriving in the county), the threat of attack initiated a successful political dialogue and Japan began trading with the West as soon as five years later, after the Treaty of Amity and Commerce was declared.

Japan experienced a massive influx of merchants, tradesmen, and tourists following its reopening. Styles and methods of art creation specific to Japan were finally available in the West. The likes of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) and delicate ceramics and pottery became incredibly popular, particularly in France and England, where these items started appearing in curiosity shops.

People were drawn to Japanese art’s aesthetic because they were soul-searching. As Matthew Martin explains, many artists and intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century believed “that the rise of industrial production in the nineteenth century had destroyed taste”. They longed for a radical shift in art; they wanted to redefine what art is and what art could be. They tried to break away from the limitations of neoclassicism’s perfectionism. They wanted art for art’s sake. Japanese art opened that door.

Japanese art, the jeweller Lucian Falize said, “taught us the poetry of the world”. Their ukiyo-e, which often depicted landscapes and regular people at leisure rather than the battle epics and classic, grey-toned military portraits that had dominated the West, felt modern and expressive. Its unique aesthetic informed the emerging social-reform art movements of the late nineteenth century, particularly Impressionism and Art Nouveau.

Bottom Left: Here we can see similiarities between the embellishments found in traditional Geisha garments and the flowing gowns of girls depicted in Gistav Klimt’s “The Virgin”

The Virgin Gustav Klimt GUS001

Blue Geisha Kuniyoshi JAP031

Impressionists were enormously influenced by Japanese art’s use of flat planes, bright colours, unusual perspectives, and emphasis on asymmetry and negative space. Nancy Hass commented that it “liberated them from the strictures of hyperrealism”. Japanese art freed these artists.

One of the most famous Impressionists (and post-Impressionists) of all time, Vincent van Gogh, adored Japanese art. Throughout his life, he collected ukiyoe prints he bought from various Parisian curiosity shops and even promoted them to his contemporaries at an exhibition in 1887. The often nature-orientated, vibrant, and flat-planed style we associated with Van Gogh today is largely thanks to his love of Japanese art. Van Gogh’s motive in his move to the south of France was to more authentically capture the spirit of Japanese landscape painting.

One work that accentuates his love for it is his Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887). Van Gogh produced two versions of this portrait of his colour merchant, Julien Tanguy, featuring backdrops of Japanese prints from famous Japanese artists such as Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Hiroshige, considered the last great master of ukiyo-e.

Art Nouveau, like Impressionism, sought to free itself from traditional art constraints and emphasised romantic expression through its use of the natural asymmetry of plants, flowers, and animals. French architect and designer Hector Guimard stressed that “nature is the greatest builder and makes nothing that is parallel and nothing that is symmetrical”.

The short-lived movement took its name “from the Paris gallery, La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, opened in December 1895 on the rue de Provence by Siegfried Bing”. Bing was an ardent admirer of Japanese art and was one of the most influential figures in Japonisme, utilising its commercial potential. Inspired by Japan’s refusal to differentiate between high and low art, Art Nouveau “embraced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk —the total work of art”

Two of the greatest artists within Art Nouveau are Gustav Klimt and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. Like van Gogh, Klimt was inspired by ukiyo-e prints and the Rinpa School of Kyoto. His work’s use of intricate patterns, vibrant colours, and gold leaf backgrounds are directly influenced by his love of Japanese art.

Haeckel was a German biologist, and his representations of deep-sea organisms and flora and fauna, characterised by whiplash curves and serpentine lines, were greatly influenced by the popularity of Japanese art. According to Cybele Gontar from the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Nouveau’s Japonisme lines “may be understood as a metaphor for the freedom and release sought by its practitioners and admirers from the weight of artistic tradition and critical expectations”.