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ART OVERSEAS - JAPONISME IN JAPAN AND CHINA - REVIEW |
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Japonisme
in Japan and in China “Blessed if I can
see anything Japanese about this one either”, an Englishwoman said in
front of Manet’s Le Fifre
(1886). “Perhaps it’s the buttons on the uniform?”, suggested her
son, mistaking a Japanese borrowing from Bismark’s Germany for an
oriental creation. One advantage of
living in a country where you cannot understand the language is that you
are not distracted by other people’s chat. The English family in the
procession through the Japonisme exhibition soon passed by in their
quest for Japanese artefacts depicted in the paintings, as pleased with
the screen print in Portrait
d’Emile Zola as they were baffled by Pissarro’s Avenue de l’Opera, soleil, matinee d’hiver. A guide to
composition and perspective might have helped the English tourists
understand the inclusion of works without any overt Japanese touch. Yet
those three elements could not explain why several of the paintings and
prints had been selected for this survey of works influenced by Japanese
arts, design, crafts or architecture. In the main, the English family
was right to look for exotic stuffage since the influence of Japanese
rarely got beneath the surface, decorating oil paintings and houses
alike, with the butterfly providing a signature for more than Whistler. In the choice of
palette, however, the relations between surface and structured could
become more complex since the positioning of large passages of primary
colours contributed to the flattening effects prominent in La
chamber de van Gogh a Arles (1889). These borrowing high art were
from prints associated with the popular arts of the low city with its
theatres and water-trade, leaving what was called the refinement of
Japanese culture to be taken upon by Western crafts and fashion houses.
In crossing national orders, aspects within Japonisme moved to different sides of the class barrier in an
exchange as over-determined as any conjured by Levi-Strauss. The exhibition’s
stopping around 1912 is perhaps why the folk arts that attracted Bernard
Leach, and got taken up by what Orwell like to abuse as sandal wearing,
vegetarians from the Fabian Society. The exhibition has
three segments: Japanese art seen in the West; Western responses in the
form of exoticism; eclectic and modern borrowing which is by far the
largest group, and hence a silent confession of how shallow European
apprehension of Japanese culture remained. After the US
American “Black Ships” compelled Japan to trade with the West, Japan
provided a fresh source for Orientalism whose racist assumptions have
been dealt with y Edward Said. In Japan’s case, the language of
prejudice still takes the political inflection of “exquisite”. That
this exhibition is shared between Paris and Tokyo is one further sign
that the trade imbalances which motivated Commodore Perry in 1853 are
still alive, though promoting different alliances. The number of US
American entries is a homage to the leading role played by that empire
in defeating Japan’s aggressive desire to keep itself free from
imperial conquest. James McNeil Whistler has a prominent place and one
that should help to expand the popular understanding of Impressionism
away from a couple of Parisian cafes. Apart from a Winslow Homer study
of ducks, the other US American are an inferior crop. Although most of
the European paintings are known from their holding museums, placing
them in the context of Japonisme highlights different aspects, causing van Gogh’s L’Italienne,
for example, to look as if had en plaited from bamboo. Delightful as is
the presentation of hitherto unperceived connections, there is also
pleasure in having one’s prejudices confirmed, as happened with
Monet’s La pie, Etratat, hiver (1868-9),
which shows Money at the outset of his recognition that snow should be
painted neither white nor dirty brown but allowed to reflect the colours
of surrounding objects. How much of this discovery, for such it was,
came from his study of Japanese prints of the snow remains to be
investigated. In teaching himself to paint snow, Monet contributed to
the now more familiar aspects of his oeuvre: the waterlillies began as
ice drifts. For Australian
eyes, it was agreeable not to seek the perhaps predictable Conder silk
fan, but instead Mortimer Menpes’s Devant
une maison de the Japonaise, a tiny painting of a potter and a
poster announcing Menpes’s New Bond Street exhibition in 1888. This
trio catalysed the thought of what an entirely Australian Japonisme
exhibition might look like. Ann Galbally has documented how the
Heidelberg group took up the vogue for Nipponoiserie
in Melbourne during the 1880s, almost as an advertising motif. Margaret
Preston unlearnt her Munich treacle training by studying at the Musee
Guimet and then by visiting Japan some thirty years later. Brett
Whiteley has just made his first visit to Japan though Japan as an idea
had long been present in his atmospherics. The impact on photography,
crafts and fashion remains high. How much were these
influences mediated through European and US copies before they reached
Australia? Even though Menpes and Preston went to the source, they could
never shed all of their western ways of looking. Hence, Australian Japonisme
presents a multi-layered puzzle. For instance, what link if any, was
there between Ethel Spowers’s print of umbrellas and Manet’s La
Queue devant la boucherie (1870-71)? Did Spowers take the image
directly from a Japanese print? Or had she no more than vague memories
of some such arrangement of circles and spokes when she set to work? The
complexity of influences filtered through metropolitan centres adds one
more challenge to studying Australia Parallel questions
could be put to Cezanne’s Mont
Sainte Victoire which is made to look like Fuji-san and is
surrounded by umbrella-like arcs. Even where the
details are open to dispute, the broad fact of Japanese influences on
European art-making is well enough known in the West for this exhibition
to provide more surprises in Tokyo than in Paris. The cultural exchange
will be incomplete until a comparable survey shows how contact with
Western art altered Japanese visual culture. A recent centenary
retrospective for Umeharo Ryuzaburo (1888-1986) not only demonstrated
how great a painter he was but presented some issues in Modernism’s
cross influences that were peculiar to Japan, most notably the depiction
of the nude. Studies of the body, frequently undraped, have been vital
in the development of occidental art, some would go further and say that
the naked human form has provided the wellspring of Western painting as
well as sculpture. Japan, despite its pornographic prints, possessed no
such tradition. Kurodi Seiki caused a minor scandal in the 1890s when he
exhibited the first full frontal nude in Tokyo. Even today, the pubic
regions are censored in Japanese films. Men conceal their genitals in
bath houses, perhaps as an incest prohibition from living at such close
quarters. Like Kuroda,
Umehara studied in France where he attached himself to Renoir (another
artist whose work is not considered to be a marker by the textbooks
specializing in how Modernism moved from a Paris atelier to a Soho
loft). Umehara’s struggles with two traditions can be traced in his
depictions of the nude, male or female, now exposing genitals and public
hair, then concealing them with a contortion of the torso. If Paris took
something of perspective and colour form Japan, Japanese artists faced a
more formidable task in adjusting to subject as much as to form and
materials. Umehara’s genius flourished in the solution to such
difficulties, placing him on a par with Matisse, and, to my eye, a
superior. Those who see Umehara’s Peking paintings as his greatest
phase rarely ask how he came to be there in the early 1940s, or why he
had to leave. The impress of foreign conquest within Modernism is as
variegated as it is recurrent. The US American imperial fist beneath the
glove of soc-called International Art means that Umehara has not been
high on James Mollison’s shopping list for the Australian National
Gallery, but neither has he found wallspace for Mexicans. That the artists
included in this exhibition by no means exhaust the spread of Japonisme
became clear as I exited through the museum’s permanent collection and
saw Courbet’s Les Vagues
(1870). |