ON JAPONISMESDutch Artists Encounter JapanIn my passion for exploring new areas in art by going back to old sources, I had been traveling through the history of art for some years when in 1996 I was confronted with the Eastern alternative to Western academicism. Until then I had been aware of Japanese culture on a surface level, sensing a richness and subtlety behind that surface, but without integrating it into my artwork. But it was through a Japanese friend, who stayed in Amsterdam for some years and is now one of the editors of the JCC Newsletter, Naoko Motojima, that I was introduced to Zen Buddhism, calligraphy, sumi–e brushdrawing, ukiyo-e prints, legends of the Samurai, silk patterns on kimonos, and much more. How fortunate friendships can be! Soon a whole world opened up for me, as I started studying woodblock prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro and I also became interested in the impact these prints had on Western art, a phenomenon described as Japonisme. Japonisme is a French word first applied to 19th-century painters in Paris who integrated Japanese elements in their paintings, starting with Edouard Manet (1832-'83). During the second half of the 19th century, two types of Japanese influence in Western art were at work: a.) A vague enthusiasm for things Japanese, which art historians call Japonaiserie: paintings of exotic objects in familiar Western academic styles. Fans, screens, porcelain entered the artist's studios and models were dressed up in Kimono. b.) On a much deeper and transforming level another type of influence is referred to as Japonisme: a new style of painting partly based on Japanese aesthetic principles: solid areas of color, strong contour lines, decorative shapes. Japanese art presented itself to Western painters as a non-European alternative to the classical inheritance, specifically: - The decorative planes of woodblock prints evoked a sense of depth in ways until then unexplored by Western artists, who had followed the traditional fixed viewpoint perspective since the early Renaissance. What revelation it was: this flatness of large areas of solid colour created a space in itself in these prints. - The possibilities of pure form by black contour lined shapes, often cut off as joined vertical panels, polyptyches or folding screens, increased their decorative use. - The unusual formats, like the extreme vertical format of the scrolls, or other irregular shapes, like fan-shapes, suggested by the subject. An example of how Japonisme was regarded an equivalent source of reference as the classical canon, the 19th-century English painter Whistler stated on beauty in art:
The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) moved to the south of France in search of his idea of 'Japanese' light. His enthusiasm for Japan and ukiyo-e prints is well documented in his letters to his brother. In one of these he wrote: 'I admire the most popular Japanese prints, colored in flat areas, and for the same reasons that I admire Rubens and Veronese. I am absolutely certain that this is no primitive art.' From 1860 onward, the influence of Japanese woodblock prints was in part responsible for the major stylistic changes that lead to what we now know as Modernism. The increasing simplification of form among 19th-century European painters culminated in abstraction between 1910 and 1920. Abstraction was above all an attempt to release painting from representing the external 'real' world (mimesis) and to enable it, like music, to speak directly of subjective experience in the language of pure forms and pure colors. Many factors played a part. It would be unthinkable without the influence of Cézanne and the Cubists. And it would not have been very likely either without the influence of Japanese prints, which, although far from being abstract themselves, do rely for their effects on abstract characteristics: decorative colors and compositional devices. One of the first painters to perceive these qualities in the Japanese prints was Manet. He shifted the emphasis from representation to color and form for their own sake and thus anticipated the concepts of space and flatness challenged by the Post-Impressionists (Van Gogh, Gaugain ). -------------------------------- While encountering all the above and deeply fascinated by the new possibilities, I set out on an aesthetic journey to find a synthesis between the 'academic' Renaissance perspective (with foreshorthening towards a central vanishing point at the horizon) and the special concept of large decorative planes (taking an extremely high or low standpoint, to move foreground and background towards the same plane). The paintings that resulted from this quest I presented as Japonismes at the Bungei Shunju Gallery in 1998. And I am very fortunate to have a new show coming up in this same gallery in Ginza, the gallery area in Tokyo, in June of this year to continue on the theme of Japonismes. Besides paintings, this new show will also include works on paper, scrolls and folding screens. With all respect for a culture that is not my own; Zen, the art of calligraphy and sumi-e brush drawing as seen through a foreign eye, has the intensity of longing for a state of awareness, for the Western mind almost impossible to reach. Nevertheless, like all the talented Japanese musicians who flood the concert halls with virtuoso performances of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, the encounter is in full swing and mutually inspiring. What attracts me is the Zen idea of detachment – 'less is more', an empty space full of energy, clearly expressed in calligraphy and sumi-e drawings. Imagine the sumi-e artist contemplating the white of the rice paper. He finds in the emptiness of the white everything to be already there – also the bird he intends to draw. So what can he possibly add to the paper to capture the essentials of the bird, those few lines that have to do more with the bird than the bird itself; lines that capture the 'birdness' of the bird. This ideality in depiction has its source in Zen and the art of calligraphy. In calligraphy, it is the movement of the hand through the air before the brush strikes the paper that gives expression to the character. The brush has become an extension of the artist's soul, as being one with the source of creation. For ages and ages, proficiency in brush writing reflected a high degree of inner character, and this is why many great masters of calligraphy were respected Zen priests, warriors and emperors. Western artists can only gaze at the Japanese masters for their liveliness in perfection. We can humbly try to take up the brush and encounter some of the purity and simplicity that would otherwise be unknown to us. What unites true works of art, music, literature and science, through all times and cultures, is the genius of Vision over Knowledge. The concept of color and form for its own sake, as presented by the Japanese, is definitely such a vision. Maryleen Schiltkamp March 2003
*) Japanese Prints and Western Painters by Frank Whitford, 1977, was the theoretical source for this essay.
TOKYO EXHIBITION: JAPONISMES Paintings, screens and scrolls, works on paper by Maryleen Schiltkamp June 23- 30 2003
at BUNGEI SHUNJU GALLERY 5-5-12 Ginza, Shud-ku Tokyo 104, Japan |