Japan's door to the outside world was opened in 1858, ending a 200-year period of total isolation. The wealth of superb Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork and architecture, as well as printmaking and painting, reached the West and brought with it electrifying new ideas of composition, colour and design. In this book, Siegfried Wichmann, the internationally renowned expert on Japonisme, accompanies his breathtaking illustrations with a text that marshals a wealth of detail and opens up new lines of enquiry.
During America's Gilded Age (dates), the country was swept by a mania for all things Japanese. It spread from coast to coast, enticed everyone from robber barons to street vendors with its allure, and touched every aspect of life from patent medicines to wallpaper. Americans of the time found in Japanese art every design language: modernism or tradition, abstraction or realism, technical virtuosity or unfettered naturalism, craft or art, romance or functionalism. The art of Japan had a huge influence on American art and design. Title compares juxtapositions of American glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese material ranging from expensive one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera. Beginning in the Aesthetic movement, this book continues through the Arts & Crafts era and ends in Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing the reader how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept. Hannah Sigur is an art historian, writer, and editor with eight years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. She has a master's degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is completing a PhD in the arts of Japan. Her writings include co-authoring A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (Timber Press, 2002), which is listed in "The Best Books of 2002" by The Christian Science Monitor and is now in its second edition; and "The Golden Ideal: Chinese Landscape Themes in Japanese Art," in Lotus Leaves, A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (2001). She lives in Berkeley.
This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition Looking East, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, January 31-May 11, 2014; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, June 28-September 15, 2014; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Japan, September 30-November 30, 2014; Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Japan, January 2-May 10, 2015; Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, Canada, June 11-September 27, 2015; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California, October 30, 2015-January 24, 2016"--Colophon.
"Girls can develop counting and sorting skills as they search for the hundreds of hidden things in this engaging, bright and busy Treasure Hunt book."--Page 4 of cover
Japonisme, the nineteenth-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the twenty-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement. This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clémence d'Ennery (1823–1898), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the “Musée d'Ennery” to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a fifty-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d'Ennery's struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day. Travelers to Japan such as the Duchesse de Persigny, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Laure Durand- Fardel returned with souvenirs that they shared with friends and family. Salon hostesses including Juliette Adam, Louise Cahen d'Anvers, Princesse Mathilde, and Marguerite Charpentier provided venues for the discussion and examination of Japanese art objects, as did well-known art dealers Madame Desoye, Madame Malinet, Madame Hatty, and Madame Langweil. Writers, actresses, and artists-Judith Gautier, Thérèse Bentzon, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few- took inspiration from the Japanese material in circulation to create their own unique works of art. Largely absent from the history of Japonisme, these women-and many others-actively collected Japanese art, interacted with auction houses and art dealers, and formed collections now at the heart of museums such as the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi, the Musée Unterlinden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
