Japonism

Japonism is a French term used to describe a range of European borrowings from Japanese art It was coined in 1872 by the French critic, collector and printmaker Philippe Burty ‘to designate a new field of study—artistic, historic and ethnographic’, encompassing decorative objects with Japanese designs (similar to 18th-century Chinoiserie), paintings of scenes set in Japan, and Western paintings, prints and decorative arts influenced by Japanese aesthetics Scholars in the 20th century have distinguished japonaiserie, the depiction of Japanese subjects or objects in a Western style, from Japonisme, the more profound influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art.

Japonisme, is the study of Japanese art and artistic talent. Japonism affected fine arts, sculpture, architecture, performing arts and decorative arts throughout Western culture. The term is used particularly to refer to Japanese influence on European art, especially in impressionism.

Ukiyo-e
From the 1860s, ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many Western artists. Ukiyo-e began as a Japanese painting school developed in the 17th century. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints were created to fit a demand for inexpensive, souvenir images. Although the prints were inexpensive, they were innovative and technical which gave each one value. These prints were rarely created with a single patron in mind, rather they were created for the commercial market in Japan. Although a percentage of prints were brought to the West through Dutch trade merchants, it was not until the 1860s that ukiyo-e prints gained popularity in Europe. Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color and composition. Ukiyo-e prints featured dramatic foreshortening and asymmetrical compositions.

History

Seclusion (1639–1858)
During the Edo period (1639–1858), Japan was in a period of seclusion and only one international port remained active. Tokugawa Iemitsu, ordered that an island, Dejima, be built off the shores of Nagasaki from which Japan could receive imports. The Dutch were the only country able to engage in trade with the Japanese, however, this small amount of contact still allowed for Japanese art to influence the West. Every year the Dutch arrived in Japan with fleets of ships filled with Western goods for trade. In the cargoes arrived many Dutch treatises on painting and a number of Dutch prints. Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818) was one of the notable Japanese artists that studied the Dutch imports. Kōkan created one of the first etchings in Japan which was a technique he had learned from one of the imported treatises. Kōkan would combine the technique of linear perspective, which he learned from a treatise, with his own ukiyo-e styled paintings.

Seclusion era porcelain
Through the seclusion era, Japanese goods remained a sought after luxury by European monarchs. Japanese porcelain manufacturing began in the seventeenth century after the unearthing of kaolin clay near Nagasaki. Japanese manufacturers were aware of the popularity of porcelain in Europe, therefore, some products were specifically produced for the Dutch trade. Porcelain and lacquerware became the main exports from Japan to Europe. Porcelain was used to decorate the homes of monarchs in the Baroque and Rococo style. A popular way to display porcelain in a home was to create a porcelain room. Shelves would be placed throughout the room to display the exotic decorations.

Nineteenth century re-opening
During the Kaei era (1848–1854), after more than 200 years of seclusion, foreign merchant ships of various nationalities began to visit Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography and printing techniques. With this new opening in trade, Japanese art and artifacts began to appear in small curiosity shops in Paris and London.

Japonism began as a craze for collecting Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e. Some of the first samples of ukiyo-e were to be seen in Paris. In about 1856 the French artist Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of the sketch book Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre. The sketchbook had arrived in Delâtre’s workshop shortly after Japanese ports had opened to the global economy in 1854; therefore, Japanese artwork had not yet gained popularity in the West. In the years following this discovery, there was an increase of interest in Japanese prints. They were sold in curiosity shops, tea warehouses, and larger shops. Shops such as La Porte Chinoise specialized in the sale of Japanese and Chinese imports. La Porte Chinoise, in particular, attracted artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas who drew inspiration from the prints.

European artists at this time were seeking an alternative style to the strict academic methodologies. Gatherings organized by shops like La Porte Chinoise facilitated the spread of information regarding Japanese art and techniques.

Artists and movements
Ukiyo-e was one of the main Japanese influences on Western art. Western artists were attracted to the colorful backgrounds, realistic interior and exterior scenes, and idealized figures. Emphasis was placed on diagonals, perspective, and asymmetry in ukiyo-e, all of which can be seen in the Western artists who adapted this style. It is necessary to study each artist as an individual who made unique innovations.

Vincent van Gogh and woodblock color palettes
Vincent van Gogh began his deep interest in Japanese prints when he discovered illustrations by Félix Régamey featured in The Illustrated London News and Le Monde Illustré. Régamey created woodblock prints, followed Japanese techniques, and often depicted scenes of Japanese life. Van Gogh used Régamey as a reliable source for the artistic practices and everyday life scenes of the Japanese. Beginning in 1885, van Gogh switched from collecting magazine illustrations, such as Régamey, to collection ukiyo-e prints that could be bought in small Parisian shops. Van Gogh shared these prints with his contemporaries and organized a Japanese print exhibition in Paris in 1887. Van Gogh’s Portrait of Pere Tanguy (1887) is a portrait of his color merchant, Julien Tanguy. Van Gogh created two versions of this portrait, which both feature a backdrop of Japanese prints. Many of the prints behind Tanguy can be identified, with artists such as Hiroshige and Kunisada featured. Van Gogh filled the portrait with vibrant colors. He believed that buyers were no longer interested in grey-toned Dutch paintings, rather paintings with many colors were seen as modern and were sought after. He was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and their colorful palettes. Van Gogh included into his own works the vibrancy of color in the foreground and the background of paintings that he observed in Japanese woodblock prints and made use of light to clarify.

Edgar Degas and Japanese prints
In the 1860s, Edgar Degas began to collect Japanese prints from La Porte Chinoise and other small print shops in Paris. Degas’ contemporaries had begun to collect prints as well which gave him a large collection for inspiration. Among the prints shown to Degas was a copy of Hokusai’s Random Sketches which had been purchased by Bracquemond after seeing it in Delâtre’s workshop. The estimated date of Degas’ adoption of Japonism into his prints is 1875. The Japanese print style can be seen in Degas’ choice to divide individual scenes by placing barriers vertically, diagonally and horizontally. Similar to many Japanese artists, Degas’ prints focus on women and their daily routines. The atypical positioning of his female figures and the dedication to reality in Degas’ prints aligned him with Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Sukenobu. In Degas’ print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery (1879-1880), the commonalities between Japanese prints and Degas’ work can be found in the two figures: one that stands and one that sits. The composition of the figures was familiar in Japanese prints. Degas also continues the use of lines to create depth and separate space within the scene. Degas’ most clear appropriation is of the woman leaning on a closed umbrella which is borrowed directly from Hokusai’s Random Sketches.

James McNeill Whistler and British Japonism
Japanese art was exhibited in Britain beginning in the early 1850s. These exhibitions featured a variation of Japanese objects, including maps, letters, textiles and objects from everyday life. These exhibitions served as a source of national pride for Britain and served to create a separate Japanese identity apart from the generalized “orient” cultural identity. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist who worked primarily in Britain. During the late 19th century, Whistler began to reject the Realist style of painting that his contemporaries favored. Instead, Whistler found simplicity and technicality in the Japanese aesthetic. Rather than copying specific Japanese artists and artworks, Whistler was influence by general Japanese methods of articulation and composition which he integrated into his works. Therefore, Whistler refrained from depicting Japanese objects in his paintings; instead, he used compositional aspects to infuse a sense of exoticism. Whistler’s The Punt (1861) displayed his interest in asymmetrical compositions and dramatic uses of foreshortening. This composition style would not be popular among his contemporaries for another ten years, however it was a characteristic of earlier Ukiyo-e art.

Japanese influence in the decorative arts
In 1851, the Goncourt brothers depict in their journal a living room decorated with Japanese art 1. From 1853 in the United States, then after 1855 in Europe, Japan’s gradual opening to international trade led to the influx into Europe of many objects: screens, fans, lacquers, porcelains, prints… which fascinated the artists and Western art lovers. In 1856, Félix Bracquemond discovered Manga of Hokusai in the workshop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre at no 171, rue Saint-Jacques, where it had been used to stall a shipment of porcelain. By reproducing his animal figures on a porcelain service, made in 1867 for Eugene Rousseau, he became the first European artist to directly copy Japanese artists.

From 1850 at least, the Hotel Drouot organizes once a year a public sale of Japanese art objects. In England, the purchase of Japanese works by institutions began in 1852, and their study influenced the appearance in furniture of an “Anglo-Japanese style” after 1862, which favors sobriety and geometry. From 1859 to 1861, black and white reproductions of ukiyo-e began to be published, notably by Delâtre or in the book Compendium of Drawings for Art and Industry, by Viscount Adalbert de Beaumont and ceramist Eugène -Victor Collinot, as well as in the relations of the Commodore Perry Expedition to Japan by Francis Hawks, translated in 1856 by Wilhelm Heine then in 1859 by Abraham Auguste Rolland, or in those of diplomatic journeys, resumed in 1858, reported by Baron Charles de Chassiron or by Laurence Oliphant and Sherard Osborn members of the Elgin mission.

Merchants tea Decelle at the sign In the Chinese Empire, located at 1857 No 45, and 1862 to 1885 at no 55, rue Vivienne, and Bouillette, at the sign of China Gate, located from 1855 to 1886 at no 36 of the same street, beginning to sell various “Chinese products, India and Japan”, which prints the Goncourt brothers in 1860, or Baudelaire in 1861, which relates to a letter of 1862: “Not long ago, I received a packet of “japanic”. I distributed them to my friends. “Félix Bracquemond and Alfred Stevensalso frequent the Chinese Gate. Similarly, since the opening in 1861 or 1862 in their shop E. Desoye near the Louvre in no 220, rue de Rivoli, Real De Soye specialize in selling Japanese art and illustrated books that amaze Baudelaire. These businesses quickly count many artists among their customers including, in addition to those mentioned above, James Tissot, Henry Fantin-Latour or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then Manet, Degas, Monet or Carolus-Duran.

James McNeill Whistler probably meets Felix Bracquemond at Delâtre, who prints his series of etchings in 1858 called the French set. He also saw Stevens in London on May 10, 1863, a few days after the opening of the Paris Salon of Painting and Sculpture where Stevens exhibited several paintings, while Whister prefers to present his painting The Girl in White (Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl) Salon des refusés, inaugurated May 15, 1863. Then, during his new trip to Paris in early October 1863, it is the turn of Beaudelaire to be presented to him through ofHenri Fantin-Latour; while with James Tissot, met at the Louvre in 1856, a certain rivalry born on the primacy of the use of this new theme in painting, according to correspondence Whistler 1863-1865.

Thus, after having realized in January 1864 Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, its first orientalizing painting appearing in fact a Chinese, Whistler received from Fantin, in April 1864, objects of the Chinese Door, probably visited with him during his travels to Paris from 1863, and borrowed others from Rossetti, in order to make three paintings with Japanese motifs, including Caprice in purple and gold. The golden screen and The Princess of the country of porcelain, which will be completed around March 1865, just when Tissot realized three others on the same subject, including The Japanese bath. To meet a demand for more and more pressing, more stores open in 1870, as in 1874 that of Siegfried Bing at the sign of the Japanese art at no 19, rue Chauchat, then the no 22, rue de Provence and that of Philippe Sichel at no 11, rue Pigalle, which will publish in 1883 notes a bibeloteur in Japan, and their owners are undertaking such as de Soye, the distant journey into the Sun- Levant.

At the 1862 Universal Exhibition in London, Sir Rutherford Alcock, a diplomat stationed in Japan since 1859, presented his personal collection of 612 Japanese artifacts. The designer Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) bought him a few and was invited to Japan by the Japanese government in 1876. He is perhaps the author of the lacquered chair, considered a forerunner of furniture in the Anglo-Japanese style., which was also presented by A.F. Bath’s Bornemann & Co at the 1862 Exhibition, which will be followed by furniture by Edward William Godwin (en)from 1867, especially for the castle of Dromore. Under Japanese influence, Napoleon III style furniture also uses black lacquer, sometimes encrusted with mother- of- pearl.

At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1867, Japan presents for the first time, in the Champ-de-Mars 14, a national pavilion, built under the direction of the architect Alfred Chapon, an artisanal farm. bourgeois house, built by Japanese artisans under the patronage of the governor of Satsuma, opposed to the shogun and supporter of the imperial restoration, which will take place in October of the same year 15. Japan exhibits this time according to her free choice, several thousand objects of her various artistic, artisanal and industrial productions, besides the engravings appearing in the Italian section; while Felix Bracquemond presents to the public his “Rousseau service”. At the end of the exhibition, 1,300 of these items are sold to the public. From then on, Japanese art began to be appreciated on a large scale. That same year, James Tissot set up a Japanese salon in his mansion on Avenue Foch.

Made possible by the greater openness of Japan to the outside world, in 1868, with the Meiji era, collectors and art critics (Henri Cernuschi, Théodore Duret, Émile Guimet), painters (Félix Régamey), undertake journeys in Japan in the 1870s and 1880s and contributed to the diffusion of Japanese works in Europe, and more particularly in France, so much so that the 1878 World Fair featured a good number of Japanese works, including Bing collections, Burty and Guimet and marks the climax of the craze for Japonism.

From 1867, Gabriel Viardot produced Japanese furniture, followed by Huguet Ameublements. Around 1870, Édouard Lièvre created a cabinetmaking workshop and also made luxurious furniture in this style, including in 1875 those of the mansion of painter Édouard Detaille, then collaborates with other cabinetmakers, such as Paul Sormani, or goldsmiths like Ferdinand Barbedienne and the house Christofle. In 1877, Whistler realizes the decor of the Peacock Room in London.

Arrived in Paris as a translator of the Japanese delegation to the 1878 Universal Exhibition, Hayashi Tadamasa (or Tasamasa) decided to stay there and in 1883, he created with Wakai Oyaji, known as Kenzaburô (若 井 兼 三郎), a company of import of Japanese art objects and prints 17, followed by Iijima Hanjuro, said Kyoshin (飯 島 半 十郎), the biographer of Hokusai. In 1886, Tadamasa introduced Parisians to the art and culture of his country through a special issue of the illustrated Paris featuring Eisen ‘s The Courtisane on cover, which Van Gogh painted a copy the following year. Tadamasa also participates in the Japanese police stationUniversal Exhibition of 1889. In 1890 he opened a shop in no 65, rue de la Victoire in Paris and, in 1894, bequeathed his collection of swords guards at the Louvre. In eleven years of activities and return trips to Japan, it will receive 218 deliveries, including 156 487 prints. He also collaborates actively in the Outamaro (1891) and Hokousai (1896) books, written by Edmond de Goncourt, providing him with translations of Japanese texts and countless information. Louis Gonse, too, uses his knowledge for his book entitled Japanese Art.

Pierre Loti’s novel, Madame Chrysanthème, published in 1887, only accentuated and popularized this fashion of Japonism. At the Parisian world exhibitions of 1878, 1889 and 1900, Japan is very present both in architecture, prints and in the production of ceramics. Japanese works enter the collections of the Louvre Museum, thanks to the legacy of Adolphe Thiers of 1884, and religious works are also acquired in 1892. For the World Fair of 1900, Hayashi Tadamasa succeeds in the fabulous challenge of bringing very great works of Japan, Emperor Meiji even offering some pieces from his personal collection.

The movement also touched, besides Bracquemond, other ceramists, such as his friends Marc-Louis Solon and Jean-Charles Cazin, also classmates with Fantin-Latour of the drawing school of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran and gathered in the Jinglar Japanese company founded in 1867, as well as enamelled stoneware, like those of Carriès, the Christofle house’s production of cloisonné and patinated metal, textile decorations and fashion. The whole of Art Nouveau, whose Samuel Bing became the defender by dedicating his art gallery to his promotion from 1895, includes many references and Japanese influences, including Emile Gallé.

Japanese influence in the arts
The main Japanese artists who influenced European artists were Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro. Artists very little recognized in Japan, because producing an art considered light and popular by the Japanese elites of the time. Japanism thus saved works that would disappear and allowed to develop a new way of Japanese art.

In return, the arrival of Westerners in Japan provoked many reactions among Japanese artists. For example in the field of painting, two great schools were formed: the so-called nihonga (“Japanese way”), which tended to perpetuate the canon of Japanese painting, and the so – called yō-ga (“western way”)), who developed the techniques and motifs of oil painting (see Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichirō, founder of the White Horse Society, Hakuba-kai).

However, the reverse movement of Japonism is called bunmeikaika (文明 開化), From Chinese wénmíng kaihua, “cultural civilization”, “hatching of civilization”). He did not arouse the interest of the Japanese artists, more concerned with the effects of their modernization and their westernization. It took a long time for Japanese artists and researchers to study Japanism.

By the late 1850s, some artists buy Japanese prints in Paris, as Whistler and Tissot and Monet who meets 231, in 1871, or Rodin, who acquires nearly 200 after 1900. Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet, Carolus-Duran, Mary Cassatt and Giuseppe De Nittis also collected Japanese prints; while Van Gogh bought it in Antwerp in 1885 and owned more than 400.

Among the European and American painters who were followers of Japonism even in their works, from 1864, Tissot, who, in 1867 and 1868, gave drawing lessons to Prince Tokugawa Akitake, Whistler, Van Gogh and Monet already mentioned, Stevens, Degas, Manet, Breitner, Renoir, Chase, etc., and even the Ukrainian-Polish Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Klimt, Auburtin or Gauguin then, under his influence, the Nabis, such as Vuillard and Bonnard, who use Japanese formats sometimes mounted in a screen.

Alfred Stevens also frequented the Chinese Door shop, where he bought objects from the Far East. At the Universal Exhibition of 1867, he presents 18 paintings, including India in Paris (also called The Exotic Bibelot), which the art critic Robert de Montesquiou greets in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. This painting is preceded by The Lady in Pink from 1866 and followed in 1868 by La Collectionneuse de porcelaines, then around 1872 by a series of several Japanese paintings. In 1893-1894, the Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitneralso produces a series of at least 6 canvases of girls in kimono of different colors inspired by his own photographs.

In 1888, Auguste Lepère created with Félix Bracquemond, Daniel Vierge and Tony Beltrand, the magazine L’Estampe originale, to interest artists and amateurs in the new processes and trends of engraving, especially in color. In this period where the Japanese influence has great influence on the decorative arts, Henri Rivière realized from that date from 1888 to 1902, The Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower. In 1891, Valloton also renews the woodcut, with Paul Gauguin or Émile Bernard andIn turn, Toulouse-Lautrec revolutionized the art of the poster, drawing in the same year that for the famous cabaret opened in 1889, called Moulin Rouge – La Goulue. Amédée Joyau ‘s wood engraved works between 1895 and 1909 also bear the mark of Japonism.

Large exhibitions of Japanese prints are also held in Paris, which participate in the dissemination of a new aesthetic. In addition to Philippe Burty’s precursory critical works, in 1873, Henri Cernuschi and Théodore Duret exhibited, at the Palais de l’industrie, the prints collected during their 1871-1873 voyage. In 1883, the Georges Petit Gallery hosted a retrospective exhibition of Japanese art of 3,000 objects, organized by Louis Gonse, the director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. In 1888, in his gallery The Japanese Art, located at no 22, Rue de Provence, where many art critics and young painters meet, Samuel Bing presents a historical exhibition of the art of engraving in Japan, and publishes the first issue of his monthly magazine, Le Japon artistique, especially read by the nabis and Gustav Klimt. In 1890, thanks to the collections of his friends, Bing organized, at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, the Exhibition of Japanese masters including 760 prints, the poster is designed by Jules Chéret. From 1909 to 1913, Raymond Koechlin devoted to prints six exhibitions at the Museum of Decorative Arts.

Artists influenced by Japanese art and culture

Gustav Klimt
The most well-known japonised painting of Gustav Klimt is The Second Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In the last style of Klimt, he was influenced by a Norwegian fuavist.

James Tissot, James McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, Bertha Lum, William Bradley, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Wesley Dow, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Pierre Bonnard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Helen Hyde,Georges Ferdinand Bigot,

In literature and poetry, the French authors of the xix th century feel the need to break with a certain classicism and look, among others, to the Orientalism and Japanese art. As far as Japan is concerned, it was not so much to take up themes as to draw inspiration from a new sensibility and aesthetics; among these authors include Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Victor Hugo.

Other writers mention the arts and the Japanese spirit in their writings, such as Marcel Proust, Edmond de Goncourt and Emile Zola. Pierre Loti wrote one of his most famous novels, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), taking as his subject his own meeting with a young Japanese woman married for a month, the precursor of Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon, and a work that is a combination of story and travel diary.

In response to the excesses of Japonism, the writer Champfleury forges, from 1872, the word “japonaiserie”. He denounces by this neologism snobbery, smug and devoid of critical spirit, which then surrounds in certain French circles all that touches on Japan; the word is then taken up to describe these exotic drifts, such as the “Japanese salad” which appears in the play of Alexandre Dumas Jr., Francillon, or the junk eroticism that is inspired by Pierre Loti and that symbolizes the word “mousme”.

Japanism in the music
In 1871, Camille Saint-Saens wrote an opera in one act, The Yellow Princess, on a libretto by Louis Gallet, in which a young Dutch girl is jealous of the fixation made by her artist friend on a Japanese print. In 1885, the comic opera, The Mikado, is presented in London by Arthur Sullivan, libretto by William S. Gilbert and opera, Madame Butterfly, Puccini is created in Milan in 1904 with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Japanese-inspired ballet, Papa Chrysanthemum, given in 1892 in the New Circus of the rue Saint-Honoré, inspires in 1895 a stained glass window in Toulouse-Lautrec, commissioned by Bing and executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Following the poets, the musicians became interested in a more concise, more incisive poetry, allowing a melodic development more delicate than the great declamation, reserved for the field of the opera. In this spirit, returning to the precision of the classical madrigal, the attention of French composers turned to translations of tanka and haikus in French.

One of the very first musicians to devote himself actively to Japanese poetry was Maurice Delage. Having traveled to India and Japan at the end of 1911, he stayed there during the year 1912. Back in France, he had sufficient mastery of the subtleties of poetic language to translate himself the poems that his friend Stravinsky put into music, in 1913, under the title Three poems of the Japanese lyrical.

Stravinsky’s work was well received when it was created in January 1914. Three years later, Georges Migot wrote Seven little pictures of Japan for voice and piano, from poems from an anthology of classic poets.

In 1925, Maurice Delage witnessed the creation of its September-hated Kaïs for soprano and ensemble of chamber music (flute, oboe, clarinet in if flat, piano and string quartet), which he himself translated the poems.

In 1927, Jacques Pillois proposed Cinq haï-kaï for quintet (flute, violin, viola, cello and harp). The hai-kai are read between the pieces.

Between 1928 and 1932, Dimitri Shostakovich composed his cycle of Six Romances on texts by Japanese poets, for tenor and orchestra, opus. The texts are partly taken from the collection of Japanese Lyric, in which Stravinsky borrowed his three poems. The subjects, which revolve around love and death, join the favorite themes of the Russian musician. He composed the first three romances the first year, the fourth in 1931 and the last two in 1932.

In 1951, the American composer John Cage in his turn proposed Cinq haikus for piano, then Seven haikus the following year. According Michaël Andrieu, the musician, “lovers of minimal forms, will be interested in haiku later in his career”.

By 1912, Bohuslav Martinů had composed his Nipponari, seven melodies for soprano and instrumental ensemble, which were only created in 1963.

The same year, Olivier Messiaen composed Seven haikai, Japanese sketches for piano and orchestra.

The composer Friedrich Cerha also composed a haiku, “really in reference to Japan,” according to Michaël Andrieu, “but whose textual content is really far away with the loss of all links to nature and poetic images (the text, in its French translation, is: The more I am tired, the more I like to be in Vienna…) “.

Japanism in fashion
Before the second half of the XIX th century, Europeans pay little cultural significance in Japan. However, in the XVII th century, Japanese kimonos are imported to Europe by the Dutch East India Company and are worn by wealthy Europeans as gowns. Imports of these authentic clothes are limited, the market is satisfied by the so-called “Indian” dressing gowns, nicknamed ” Japonsche rocken” (“Japanese dresses”) in Holland, “Indian dressing gowns” in France and “Banyans” (“Indian merchant”) in England. After the opening of Japan in 1868 (Meiji era), the kimono is definitely adopted in its use of dressing gown (Madame Hériot(1892) by Auguste Renoir is represented with an interior kimono-robe; in 1908, Callot Sisters made a reinterpreted Japanese kimono dress), while her fabric was used to make Western dresses, for example crinolines dresses (see Condition of women in the West during the Belle Epoque). Japanese motifs are also adapted to Western textiles, for example representatives of plants, small animals or even family cabinets on Lyon silks. In the 20 th century, if the shape of the kimono is becoming commonplace to the point of finally being confused with the robe, the traditional kimono retains a real influence on Western fashion.

Japanese gardens
The aesthetic of Japanese gardens was introduced to the English-speaking world by Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan (Kelly & Walsh, 1893). It sparked the first Japanese gardens in the West. A second edition was required in 1912. Conder’s principles have sometimes proved hard to follow:

Robbed of its local garb and mannerisms, the Japanese method reveals aesthetic principles applicable to the gardens of any country, teaching, as it does, how to convert into a poem or picture a composition, which, with all its variety of detail, otherwise lacks unity and intent

Samuel Newsom’s Japanese Garden Construction (1939) offered Japanese aesthetic as a corrective in the construction of rock gardens, which owed their quite separate origins in the West to the mid-19th century desire to grow alpines in an approximation of Alpine scree. According to the Garden History Society, the Japanese landscape gardener Seyemon Kusumoto was involved in the development of around 200 gardens in the UK. In 1937 he exhibited a rock garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, and worked on the Burngreave Estate at Bognor Regis, a Japanese garden at Cottered in Hertfordshire, and courtyards at Du Cane Court in London.

The impressionist painter Claude Monet modeled parts of his garden in Giverny after Japanese elements, such as the bridge over the lily pond, which he painted numerous times. By detailing just on a few select points such as the bridge or the lilies, he was influenced by traditional Japanese visual methods found in ukiyo-e prints, of which he had a large collection. He also planted a large number of native Japanese species to give it a more exotic feeling.

Museums
In the United States, the fascination with Japanese art extended to collectors and museums creating significant collections which still exist and have influenced many generations of artist. The epicenter was Boston in no small part due to Isabella Stewart Gardner, a pioneering collector of Asian art. As a consequence, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now houses the finest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery house the largest Asian art research library in the United States and house Japanese art together with the Japanese influenced works of Whistler.

Source from Wikipedia