Japonisme

Introduction

The late nineteenth-century Western fascination with Japanese art directly followed earlier European fashions for Chinese and Middle Eastern decorative arts, known respectively as Chinoiserie and Turquerie. Art dealer Siegfried Bing was one of the first importers of Japanese decorative arts in Paris. He sold them in his shop La Porte Chinoise, as well as promoted them in his luxury magazine Le Japon Artistique, published from 1888-1891. Bing was also a major proponent of Art Nouveau, a fin-de-siècle decorative style heavily influenced by Japaneseism. The word Japonisme is a French term referring to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design among many Western European artists in the nineteenth century after the forced reopening of foreign trade with Japan in 1858. Japonisme was first described by the French art critic and collector Philippe Burty in 1872 [1]. The term Japonism was first used in the 1870s and originally referred to the academic study and appreciation of Japanese art and creative talent. However, the impact of this field of study was pervasive, and Japaneseism soon began to influence both the visual and decorative arts of European culture. Elements of traditional Japanese design were incorporated into British and French furniture projects, resulting in an innovative fusion of styles that remained popular well into the 20th century (Japonism | Mayfair Gallery). Indeed, according to art historian Gabriel P. Weisberg, Japonisme can be thought of as a type of "East-West Renaissance." an example of the last few days of the kind of cultural diffusion that occurred during the Renaissance, when the excitement of classical revelations stimulated imitation and respect" (Japonisme 43). As Weisberg explains, the term Japonisme itself was originally coined in 1872 by a French art critic, Philippe Burty, to "define a new field of study—artistic, historical, and ethnographic" (xi) that would present a more systematic and understandable approach to newly discovered Japanese art. The current interest in the region has also highlighted the need for an "integrated, global view" (Wichmann 13), and in doing so has also highlighted the need for attention both to its multiple aspects and to its specific character. Nor is it merely a historical interest that fueled today's interest in Japaneseism, but rather the growing perception that by helping to free the Western artistic mindset from the constraints of its naturalistic and academic conferences, the influence of Japanese aesthetics served as a dynamic force behind the various innovative and intermediate movements of the late 19th century that collectively served to form Modernism. (CHIBA).

History

In the 1860s, just as the Japanese themselves knew Western art in general, Japanese prints began to arrive in Europe in significant numbers and became very fashionable, especially in France. They were very influential on many artists, including Edouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Félix Vlotton, and Mary Casat. In 1872, Jules Claretti called the trend "Le Japonisme". [6] [3]. Although Japanese influence was reflected in many artistic media, including painting, it led to a revival of woodcut in Europe, which was in danger of disappearing as a serious art medium. Most of the above artists, except Félix Vallotton and Paul Gauguin, actually used lithography, especially for color printing. See below for Japanese influence on children's book illustrations [3]. The artists, notably Edvard Munch and Franz Masereel, continued to use the medium, which in Modernism became attractive because it was relatively easy to complete the entire process, including printing, in a studio with little special equipment. The German Expressionists made extensive use of woodcut [3].

Unlike earlier Orientalism (Near East) and Chinoiserie (Chinese) of the 18th century, both more gradual and diffuse Japonisme tended to have a concentrated character. Importantly, his influence also covered a wide range from iconographic to decorative art, from literature to theater. Although the basic stages of its development are delineated differently by various scholars, there is general agreement that the first initial and initial phase began with the opening of the country held by Commodore Perry in 1854 and continued until 1867, the year of the first Universelle Exposition in Paris. the second phase, during which influence extended to the bourgeoisie, was from 1868 to about 1883, during which a taste for things that the Japanese swept across Europe as well as attracted attention in America. The third or popular phase lasted until about the outbreak of World War I, although for the general public a decline had begun to form after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) that changed Japan's image from the nation of blooming beauty to that of power. (CHIBA).

Arts

At the heart of Western fascination with Japanese art was Ukiyoe, wood prints. A Buddhist term meaning "the sad world" or "the floating world," with connotations of the impermanence of earthly existence, Ukiyoe came to denote, by extension, the frivolous pleasure-seeking aspects of urban life. Although most of these "Images of the Floating World" were in color, monochrome prints have attracted just as much attention since the first revelation of Hokusai's Manga in Paris in 1856 by engraver Félix Bracquemond. A series of 15 volumes of sketchbooks in black and white, the Manga remained, for the next few decades, the most popular of all Japanese prints and art objects, including monochrome ink paintings and image rollers, and became the staple among collectibles. The various sketches in the Manga focus on the social and cultural aspects of everyday life, customs and legends of the Japanese people, as well as nature, rendered with fantastic realism and characterized by a light comic touch (see Fig.). Hokusai was a versatile teacher capable of all expressions from the serious to the comic, from symbolism to realism, and these diverse qualities, inherent in Japanese art itself, were assimilated by Western artists for various effects. By 1867, at the time of the Universelle Exposition in Paris, Japanese prints were everywhere, and most forms of Japanese art were available in the early 1870s. At this exhibition the Japanese government itself exhibited, for the first time, its art objects , and of the hundred prints presented many were later sold to the public. This exhibition, which certainly highlighted "the sudden wave of Japonisme after 1868" (Weisberg, Japonisme 143), was subsequently followed by exhibitions in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), and Paris in 1878, 1889, and 1900. Each time more works are exhibited and sold. (CHIBA).

The commentaries on Japanese art found in the writings of many British artists, designers and writers of the time span the spectrum from the receptive to the reactionary. Rossetti was "amazed and delighted with the Japanese designs" and "their tremendous energy, their instinct for any flavors of life and movement, their extraordinary superiority in symmetry in decorative form, the magic of touch and impeccable execution, seduced him" (Some Reminiscences 276). The architect William Burges was impressed by the Japanese art exhibited at the 1862 exhibition, surprised that these unknown "barbarians" (254) produced such art as to surpass even part of European medieval art. John Ruskin, however, who once wanted to go to Japan to understand its art form, later became hostile, so that a performance of the "primitive" Japanese magicians at St. Martin's Hall in London in 1867 only served to further convince him that the Japanese were an inferior race, leading him to reject any Japanese prints offered to him by a bookseller. Walter Pater, who expressed his preference for Japanese art, comparing it to ancient Greek art, nevertheless criticized the representation of the human figure. Charles Algernon Swinburne and Arthur Simmons held the same view, as did William Morris who felt that the Japanese had no decorative sense and therefore disapproved of their influence on Western art. By contrast, Walter Crane, a book illustrator, was amazed by the "extraordinary decorative boldness," the "fine coloring," and the "extraordinary precision of technique." All these fezes, he said, "overwhelmed the art world" (63-64). The naturalist philosopher George Moore was fascinated by the harmony and symbolic expression of universal sensation he discovered in Japanese prints, and was surprisingly pleased that nowhere in Ukiyoe color prints could be found any desire to imitate life. W.E. Henley followed Whistler, who equated Japan and ancient Greece in their artistic ambitions and described them as two nations where "art reigned supreme" and as "lovers of beauty" (159, 138). Calling for systematization and synthetic analysis of Japanese art, Henley warned against the Western habit of taking prints and Hokusai out of the context of the entire richness of his tradition and accepted no excuse for Western ignorance of Japanese aesthetics. (CHIBA).

Literature

The assimilation of Japanese art into literature is arguably more complex and demanding than pictorial, and in general it seems that the more serious and profound the author, the slower the assimilation process and the less obvious its manifestation. As Earl Miner notes, "by transferring their interest in Japanese art to literature," novelists address "problems that should not be solved by pictorial methods" (43, 71). In poetry, images from color prints can be provoked impressionistically by the use of short sentences, broken structure, verb phrases and colorful nouns, although here what is required first is an internalization of aesthetics. Exploring this process, W. L. Schwartz and more recently Elwood Hartman demonstrated the Japanese artistic influence on various aspects of the literary works of great French poets such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé, as well as the novelists Goncourt, Zola, and Proust. Had he "not attracted such gigantic writers," writes Miner, Japonisme "might well have remained as superficial as the craze for the Chinoiseries" (69)—the kind of short-lived Japanese fashion exemplified by Pierre Loti's pop imperialist novel, Madame Chrysanthème (1888), which, describing the adventure of a French naval officer with a geisha in Nagasaki,  it is essentially a work of exotic Japonaiserie . (CHIBA). In Britain, the greatest Victorian poets – Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Hardy and Browning – all failed to live up to Japonisme, and Rossetti's Japonisme is expressed not so much in poetry as in paintings. Among the poets who made the effort were Wilde, Swinburne, and Henley, all under Whistler's influence. Swinburne, for example, uses broken rhythms and chromatic arrangement, reminiscent of Whistler's use of color harmony in imitating Hiroshige's or Harunobu's prints. Wilde's technique of stacking up color after color in his poem about an exotic dancing girl, "Impression Japonaise," later titled "Le Panneau," creates pictorial images in the fashion of color prints, and "Symphony in Yellow" reads like Whistler's paintings about the harmony of colors. Henley's impressionist vers libre was also inspired by Ukiyoe, as in his "Ballade of a Toyokuni Color-Print" (1877), although the poem ends up being an exotic piece of sentimental Japonaiserie, despite his knowledge of Japanese art as an art critic. Later, of course, one finds the influence of Whistler and the Japanese in The Image of Ezra Pound. (CHIBA).

Oscar Wilde, who is known to have decorated his Oxford rooms in the mid-1870s with blue porcelain and Hokusai prints, was prompted to write an essay entitled "The English Renaissance of Art," in which he describes his nation with Japanese art which, unlike Western art which bears "the intolerable weight of its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual tragedy of its own utensils,  " maintains "faithful to primary and iconographic conditions" (Miscellanies 260-61). This essay was based on a lecture he gave during his American tour in 1882, at the end of which he declared his desire to go to Japan in order to study its art as it existed in that country. Denouncing Morris' negative view of Japanese art elsewhere, Wilde extolled the paradoxical Japanese sense of decoration. The Japanese have, he said, "perfect knowledge of how to make a space decorative without decorating it," and because of "their strong instinct about where to place a thing, the Japanese are high-class decorative artists" (Miscellanies 109). Most notably, book illustrator and theater designer Charles Ricketts was so impressed by Utamaro's harmony of colors and "way of dressing" that he later incorporated these qualities into his exquisite sets for plays such as Salome in 1906 and the revival of the production of The Mikado in 1926. With a keen eye for artistic excellence, Ricketts was one of the few who appreciated the decorative boldness of Corin's magnificent 17th-century displays. A professional collector of Japanese art, he owned, until the end of his life, over 350 quality prints collected with Charles Shannon. (CHIBA).

Music

In Michael Sullivan's terms, in music we can relate Japonerie to visual elements, including costumes, props, and props that produce a Japanese effect through physical objects. Japonerie can also be seen in written elements of a work, such as the title, libretto and/or any descriptive text that may accompany the work. Because the Japonaiserie involved the use of artifacts to create a Japanese effect in an otherwise Western painting, Japonaiserie music is perhaps the inclusion of general exotic markers, such as pentatony, used to create an exotic sound in an otherwise Western composition. Other such exotic markers, however, come from a long tradition of exoticism in music and may not necessarily represent something that sounds particularly Japanese. The serious concern given to Japonisme can be translated into using folk melodies, recordings borrowed from real Japanese music to create an authentic element of Japanese music within a musical work (Steadman).

These distinctions create separate categories for different types of Japonisme in musical works. Using all three terms in their specific context, we can easily differentiate the type of artistic Japonisme can be behind each piece.

Notable Compositions

Madama Butterfly  – Giacomo Puccini (1904)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTT5FlTvz4A  

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful supporter of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers from the late Baroque era. Although his early work was deeply rooted in traditional romantic Italian opera of the late 19th century, he later developed his work in the realist verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents ('Giacomo Puccini'). Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts (originally two), with an Italian libretto by Luigi Ilica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It was based on John Luther Long's 1898 short story Madame Butterfly, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jenny Correll and Pierre Lotti's semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème. Long's version was dramatized by David Belasco as a one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after its premiere in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year (‘Madama Butterfly’).

Prints – Debussy (1903)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-YcnPXY2yE  

Estampes ("Prints"), L.100, is a composition for solo piano by Claude Debussy. It was completed in 1903. The first performance of the work was given by Ricardo Viñez to the National Music Society in Paris. This three-movement piano suite is impressionistic. The Estampes is a suite containing three movements: Pagodas – about 4-5 minutes (B major). La soirée dans Grenade ("Evening in Granada") – approx. 5+1⁄2 minutes (F minor → F♯♯ major). Jardins sous la pluie ("Gardens in the Rain") – approx. 3+1⁄2 minutes (E minor → E major) (‘Prints’).

Images – Debussy (1904-5 and 1907)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L47SRue0gt8  

Images (usually pronounced in French) is a suite of six compositions for solo piano by Claude Debussy. They were published in two books/series, each consisting of three pieces. These works are different from Debussy's images. The first book was written between 1901 and 1905 and the second book was written in 1907. [1] Total duration is approximately 30 minutes. Regarding the first series of images, Debussy wrote to his publisher, Jacques Durand: "Without false pride, I feel that these three pieces hold up well and that they will find their place in piano literature ... to the left of Schumann or to the right of Chopin... ". Debussy wrote another collection, pictures of oubliées (L. 87), in the winter of 1894 and dedicated it to Yvonne Lerole, daughter of painter Henry Lerolele (‘Images (Composition)’).

La Mer – Debussy (1905)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOCucJw7iT8  

La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (French for the sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), or simply La mer (The Sea), L. 109, CD. 111, is an orchestral composition by French composer Claude Debussy. The piece was written between 1903 and 1905 and premiered in Paris in October 1905. Initially, it was not well received. Even some who were ardent supporters of Debussy's work were not thrilled, although Lammer presented three key aspects of Debussy's aesthetics: impressionism, symbolism, and Japaneseism. [1] The play was performed in the United States in 1907 and in Britain in 1908. After its second appearance in Paris, in 1908, it quickly became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works (‘The sea (Debussy)').

Three Japanese Lyrics by Igor Stravinsky (1913)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddtzc81iYsk  

Each of the Three Japanese Verses bears a dedication: Maurice Delage, Florence Schmidt, and Ravel, respectively. They premiered in January 1914 in Paris in a program that also included the premiere of Ravel Mallarmé and Quatre Poèmes Hindous' songs with similar Delage music. Stravinsky found the texts for the Verses in an anthology of Japanese script translated into Russian (the titles are the names of ancient poets). "The impression they made on me was exactly like that made by Japanese paintings and engravings," the composer said. "The graphic solution of the problems of perspective and space shown by their art prompted me to find something similar in music."

Seven Haïkaï – Olivier Messiaen (1962)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnMcor5Cyeo  

Messiaen created Sept Haïkaï (1963) as a tribute to a country he truly appreciated and admired. Although these pieces span nearly a century, they share elements of Japonisme. Olivier Messiaen's Sept Haïkaï was written in 1962, after the composer's honeymoon in Japan with his second wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod. The work premiered on October 30, 1963, at the Odéon Théâtre of France in Paris, under the baton of Pierre Boulez, who was one of Messiaen's students at the Paris Conservatory. The extended piano solos on the piece were undertaken by Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Lauriode. The work is written for a set of eleven woodwind instruments (piccolo, flute, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two B-flat clarinets, bass clarinet and two bassoons), two brass instruments (trumpet and trombone), eight violins, xylophone, marimba, solo piano and four percussionists, who play cowbells, crotales (small, color-arranged discs), triangle, tubular bells, Turkish cymbals, Chinese cymbals,  Gong and Tom-Toms.

Bibliography

Arthur Sullivan. Wikipedia, 4 Jan. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur_Sullivan&oldid=1131440666.

CHIBA, YOKO. ‘Japonisme: East-West Renaissance in the Late 19th Century’. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 1998, pp. 1–20. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029769.

'Estampes'. Wikipedia, 24 Oct. 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estampes&oldid=1117930660.

‘Giacomo Puccini’. Wikipedia, 27 Dec. 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Giacomo_Puccini&oldid=1129959430.

‘Images (Composition)’. Wikipedia, 1 May 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Images_(composition)&oldid=1085621321.

Japonism | Mayfair Gallery. https://www.mayfairgallery.com/japonism. Accessed 19 Sept. 2022.

'La Mer (Debussy)'. Wikipedia, 26 Nov. 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=La_mer_(Debussy)&oldid=1123923726.

‘Madama Butterfly’. Wikipedia, 3 Jan. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Madama_Butterfly&oldid=1131394447.

Steadman, Amanda. Images of Japonisme: The Portrayal of Japan in Select Musical Works. p. 75.