Japonisme 2.0: A Global Art Meta-Genre
By David McElhinney
I was in Greece recently, walking along the main street of a small island village I used to visit every year as a child, when a piece of art stopped me in my tracks. The framed, 2D print depicted the town square, the center of social life, a formative place in my childhood. It would have been easy to reel in the years; think about how I learnt to play backgammon and draughts on that table near the gyros shop or that old crone who sat under the arch, day after day, glowering at all and sundry. But it was the style of art that gave me pause. It was unmistakable. The town square had been rendered in the flat plane, slice-of-life style that typified much of the great ukiyo-e and byobu (folding screen) art of the Edo period (1603-1868). The perspective in this Greek print was more isometric, the composition more scattered, the familiar colors of Japan replaced by a soporific blue that suffused the entire piece. Not Japanese art, but certainly Japanese-inspired; trace elements of Katsushika Hokusai and the Kano School painters were detectable in the overall presentation.
That a Greek artist on a small island adrift in the Aegean was apparently inspired by the works of Japanese masters may be of little surprise in our globalized and interconnected world. After all, the West has become increasingly fascinated with Japan: floods of travelers are booking trips to the archipelago, the anime craze is dominating Netflix, Japanese authors in translation are eating up space on UK bookstore shelves, and Japanese design sensibilities are now mainstays in the world of international fashion. This feels like a sequel, maybe even a remaster, of a story from the late-19th century, when Japanese art began invading – revolutionizing – overseas markets. History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Japanese Art Sets Sail for the West
When Japan ended sakoku, its policy of national isolation, in 1853, the Dutch, stationed on a manmade islet off the coast of Nagasaki, no longer had a monopoly on trade with the then-mysterious empire in the East. Japanese art soon began flowing into France – the trend-setter and cultural custodian of 19th-century Western art – through the port of Le Havre en route to Paris, causing radical shifts in the way art and the artistic process was understood. The evidence suggests Japan was wise to the value of such soft power diplomacy. At the 1867 World’s Fair, or Paris Exposition Universelle, Japan hosted its own arts and crafts exhibition, selling paintings, woodblock prints, kimono, fans, pottery, metalwork, lacquerware, statuary, sculpture, and folding screens, thereby introducing Parisians to the world of Japanese art, with its dramatic foreshortening, use of negative space, roots in nature, and asymmetrical design.
The Meiji government, instated a year later, continued this process throughout the 1870s and ‘80s, capitalizing on the cultural cache prior exhibitions had generated, introducing not just more artworks and objects than ever before, but also disseminating information on cultural context, historical background, and the social milieu in which the art was created. This allowed both the government and the artists to rake in foreign money, while maintaining the mythos of Japan as an exotic and distant land in which a sensitivity to fleeting beauty was part of the people’s DNA. Japanese artists also benefited from industrial techniques acquired in the West, like synthetic dyes and glass-blowing methods, allowing them to expand the manufacture and reach of their products at home.
Around this time, a group of rule-breaking iconoclasts were ruffling the feathers of the artistic elite from their studios in Paris’s grubby 17th arrondissement. Their names – Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir – are embedded in the Western art canon as pioneers of the impressionism movement; one that many scholars argue couldn’t have taken place without Japanese art imports. James Tissot’s Young Ladies Examining Japanese Objects (1867), Manet’s The Railway (1873), Edgar Degas’s Racecourse: Amateur Jockeys (1876-77), and Monet’s Varengeville Church (1882) were all in some way indebted to the Edo-period masters, showing that flavors from the East were redefining Western tastes.
Another of their art world contemporaries, the influential critic and collector Philippe Burty, decided this craze for things Japanese needed a name, and he called it Japonisme. Burty was one of many champions of this “newly discovered” art world, a cohort who believed that new trends were to be judged upon their inherent merits rather than instinctively decried. And there were plenty of critics; in Paris, Vienna, New York, and particularly London, where the landed gentry found Japanese styles vulgar and unappealing. While Burty coined the term Japonisme, it’s Vincent van Gogh whose name is often most associated with it. Just look at his Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887), in which the subject of the painting appears before a collage of ukiyo-e – one of many works in Van Gogh’s oeuvre that uses mimicry and interpretation of Japanese prints. Van Gogh’s praise for Japanese art was so effusive, in fact, he believed his career trajectory would have been unrecognizable had he not moved to Paris in the mid-1880s, when Japonisme was hitting an apex and there were around 40 specialist Japanese art shops and countless other works to be found in the city’s department stores and galleries. “In my imagination, I am constantly in Japan,” he later wrote. “In a way all my work is founded on Japanese art.”
It would be disingenuous to think of the influence of Japanese art as monolithic. Some Western artists used the techniques of flat planes and asymmetry. Some explored bold contrasts between foreground and background, much as you’d see in a work by Hokusai or Hiroshige Utagawa. Others depicted natural ephemera or the rhythms of daily life with all their wabi-sabi imperfections. It was a case of plucking, borrowing, appropriating, honoring, or innovating while retaining one’s originality.
The most strident of Japanese art proponents believed form and style were not enough; it was all about the philosophy. As Van Gogh once noted, “If we study Japanese art, then we see a man [Hokusai], undoubtedly wise and a philosopher and intelligent, who spends his time – on what? – studying the distance from the earth to the moon? – no… he studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants – then the seasons, the broad features of landscapes, finally animals, and then the human figure.”
The influence of Japanese paintings and prints is well documented, but less discussed is the influence of objet d’art. Many imported pieces were everyday household objects, once only considered for their utilitarian values, that the Japanese had rendered as works of uncompromising beauty using ceramic, lacquer, enamel, bronze, and cloisonne. This caused a similar flurry of creativity amongst the decorative artists of the age – trunk maker Louis Vuitton, interior designer and architect Eileen Gray, and jewelers Boucheron and Lucien Gallard got in on the act – inspiring movements like Art Nouveau and Art Deco, which would later find their way back to Japan, perhaps most famously through the Tokyo Teien Metropolitan Art Museum, which served as the home of Prince Asaka and his family in the early-1930s. That it carries the artistic signatures of Henri Rapin and Rene Lalique is a case of something coming full circle.
Japonisme 2.0
Perhaps the exchange of ideas between Japan and the West is more continued osmosis than a series of neat and well-defined cycles. Nevertheless, it feels like we are now in a world of Japonisme 2.0. The print I spotted on that Greek island this summer got me thinking about how often I see Japanese sensibilities in Western art and design today, from the use of framing, composition, and perspective in gardens to the continued influence of postwar fashionistas like Issey Miyake, Rei Kuwakabo, and Yohji Yamamoto.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Modern fine dining restaurants from New York to Barcelona, Singapore to Athens, deliver food with a lightness of touch, delicate plating, in multiple courses, and using elements of subtractive cooking, all of which have been part of the Japanese culinary tradition for centuries. American-made cartoons – Blue Eye Samurai, Blood of Zeus, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf – have adopted the kabuki-esque anime drawing style, and even Disney Pixar turned to Japan for its 2014 hit, Big Hero 6, set in the fictional metropolis of San Fransokyo, a reimagined Bay Area with electrified skyscrapers, torii gates, and billboards emblazoned with kanji script. The video game industry, in which Japan has long been a leading creative light, was dominated by Western-made bro shooters and Hollywood-style blockbusters for much of the 21st century. But Japanese games have regained prestige and spawned popular subgenres, with “Soulslike” games, “Metroidvanias,” and Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) becoming playgrounds for Western imitation. And with the number of Japanese art exhibitions in major cities in the US, the UK and Europe, it’s no wonder The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is now as recognizable as Whistler’s Mother, Starry Night or The Scream.
As in the Meiji era, Japan is keen to capitalize on the success of its cultural products abroad. What was the national “Cool Japan” strategy of the 2010s, if not a collective leaning-in to the global popularity of Pikachu, Mario, Hello Kitty and their ilk? But Japonisme 2.0 is not a result of government strategy. The movement had to arise naturally, much as the work of a painter flows from the subconscious to the end of the brush with little human interference. It lives and dies by its own merits, by the universal appeal and enduring creativity of Japan’s approach to art.
About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and occasional editor based in Tokyo and the UK. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, politics and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.
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