Japonisme

Wall Label: CHAT PANEL: Fascination with Japan took root in the 1860s, soon after the opening of Japanese ports to the West. Edgar Degas was one of the first French artists to discover Japanese art at mid-decade, along with Édouard Manet, James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Félix Bracquemond, and the expatriate American James Abbott McNeill Whistler. By 1872, when the term "Japonisme" was coined by Philippe Burty, critic and avid collector of things Japanese, Japanese influence was becoming far more pervasive. Artists and critics of the French avant-garde were studying Japanese prints to absorb valuable lessons-in composition; flattened, bird's-eye, oblique, and one-point perspectives; contrast of dense pattern with blank areas; and subject matter-in order to apply them within the context of their own art.

This exhibition is intended only as a brief introduction to the topic of Japonisme. These prints have been selected to illustrate the compositional devices and subjects of greatest significance for late 19th-century French artists. Oblique recession into space, the use of bird's-eye perspective, and motifs such as waves and bridges are all present in the landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Other prints contain flat fields of color without gradation, cut-off and foreshortened figures, or figures gazing back over their shoulders. All of these devices entered Degas's repertory and are identifiable in his work.

The appearance of the first Japanese delegation in Europe in 1862, the inclusion of a Japanese pavilion at the Universal Exposition of 1867 in Paris, and the increasing availability of Japanese goods at Parisian specialty shops opened during the decade all stimulated the development of Japonisme. Critics and dealers began visiting Japan in 1871 and collecting impressive numbers of Japanese works to keep and to sell in France. Tadamasa Hayashi, a trained printer who came to Paris in 1878 to work for the Japanese commissioner at the Universal Exposition of that year, remained to become a highly knowledgeable connoisseur of and respected dealer in Japanese art. The decade of the 1880s was distinguished by the publication of the first chronological history of these materials, Louis Gonse's L'Art japonaise (1883), and by the appearance of well-known art dealer "Samuel" (Siegfried) Bing's Le Japon artistique (Artistic Japan), a magazine issued monthly from 1888 until 1891. The widespread appreciation for Japanese art had become an integral part of late 19th-century French culture.