Creative Misunderstanding

 

Katsushika Hokusai, “Fine Wind, Clear Weather,” also known as Red Fuji, from the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” about 1830–31. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper.Credit...Nellie Parney Carter Collection; via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A couple things interesting in my notes below.  First, the complex interplay between European artists' "creative misunderstanding" of Japanese art (how the article deals with Edward Said).  Second, how Japanese art caused a new vocabulary and grammar for art -- different things become important (like in The Structure of Scientific Revolution), different things are "worth recording."  

In this NYT review of Boston MFA exhibit on Hokusai's "origins and influences," Jason Farago (who did this fabulous NYT interactive piece on one of Hokusai's prints) writes:

Europeans had, by Hokusai’s day, been drawing from Chinese, Persian and Indian examples in the creation of the decorative arts. But when Japanese prints finally began to circulate in Western Europe after his death — especially in 1870s Paris, defeated in war and transforming at full tilt into a metropolis — they appeared as both aesthetic gems and spiritual life rafts. In Hokusai and his rivals, young Parisians losing their roots found a liberation from worn visual vocabularies, and Japonisme, as the fashion was called, stretched from the painting salon to the dinner table. Fuji-themed inkstands. Velvet curtains bedecked with lotus blossoms. Transferware with fish and fowl copied from manga. “Japonisme was in the process of revolutionizing the vision of the European peoples,” wrote the diarist Edmond de Goncourt. The pottery, the lacquerware, and above all the woodblocks “brought to Europe a new sense of color, a new decorative system, and, if you prefer, a poetic imagination.”

That these artists, composers and designers did not take a scientific interest in Japanese culture hardly needs spelling out, any more than Japanese printmakers did when they depicted the “exotic” West. But the French fashion for things Japanese offers one of the richest examples ever of the productive capacity of misunderstanding foreign things — above all for the artists who would become the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose soft colors, flat expanses and neglect of shading would never have emerged without their Japanese forerunners. It wasn’t just the pictorial grammar; it was also Hokusai’s bourgeois sensibility, his attention to theater and fashion and women of the night. That taste for city life convinced Monet, Degas and their peers that their fleeting impressions of modern French life could be the stuff of high art. And even as they indulged stereotypes of Japanese delicacy or purity — when they fell into the “battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” that Edward Said called Orientalism — these Europeans were changed all the same by Japan, and irrevocably.

Another NYT article (in Style section)on Japonisme in Europe:

***

It also morphed into two aesthetic movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Art Nouveau and Art Deco, often erroneously thought to have been entirely creations of the West but in reality impossible without previous exposure to Japanese art and design. “They have taught us,” the jeweler Lucien Falize once said of the Japanese, “the poetry of this world.”

***

The French obsession with Japanese culture and art, which resulted in one of the most fecund creative periods Europe has ever known, was a dense brew of appropriation, commerce and respect.  

***

Subtly but swiftly, European art’s Christian subtext was replaced by Shintoism’s reverence for the natural world — a philosophy in which everything from mountains to humans possessed spiritual energy — as well as the circles of Zen Buddhist calligraphy that represented enlightenment or imperfection. 

*** 

For the French, who still determined Western aesthetics, Japan’s opening was fortuitous: They were ready for a new way of seeing. The neo-Classical perfectionism epitomized in the 19th century by the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a style perpetuated by rigid training at academies such as the École des Beaux-Arts, was becoming passé. Portraits of aristocrats and heroic battle scenes, however spectacularly rendered, began to seem retrograde as the empire of Napoleon III gave way to the Third Republic, and the middle class expanded. The ukiyo-e, which used simple techniques to depict everyday people at leisure — sitting at the sea’s edge or strolling through a field — seemed modern in comparison. And Japanese decorative arts, which captured fleeting moments (a leaping carp, a blossom carried on the wind) in ceramic or enamel inspired a new sort of freedom. “Everything changed after France was exposed to Japan and ran it through the French sensibility,” says Béatrice Quette, the curator of Asian collections at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an institution founded in 1882, at the height of Japonisme. “French design — France, really — was never quite the same.” 

***

THE IMPRESSIONISTS LIKED to claim that it was they alone who “discovered” the Japanese masters, they who realized the importance of their use of bright colors, odd perspective, flat planes and off-kilter composition, which ultimately liberated them from the strictures of hyperrealism — and that is mostly how art history has recorded it. But while the painters and collectors may have asserted dominion over Japanese art as it entered Europe, it was, in fact, the decorative artisans who initially made something new of it.

The French painter and printmaker Félix Bracquemond reportedly first encountered the ukiyo-e master Hokusai’s prints in 1856, at the shop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre, who showed Bracquemond a legendary manga series the artist had completed four decades earlier. Perhaps used as packing material to protect a shipment of Japanese porcelain, the block prints in black, gray and pale pink in the style known as kacho-ga, depicted birds in flight, tissue-soft flowers and lacy dragonflies.

For Bracquemond, the Japanese prints represented a fresh visual language for a changing world. He soon sought out other ukiyo-e, including Hiroshige’s 20-print “Grand Series of Fishes” (1830s and ’40s) and the 1848-49 flower-and-bird prints by Katsushika Taito II, using them as source material for what would become one of the earliest expressions of Japonisme.