Notes on Japonisme
European painting had pursued “naturalistic illusionism” since the Renaissance. Japanese art had different ideals. Rather than using perspective, light, and shadow, to create the appearance of depth, Japanese prints and paintings tended toward “flatness.”
Japanese art also favored
The partial view, the view as from a very great height, the suspension of figures in space without a background,
all of which flouted the conventional European rules of composition.
In the late 19th century, European encounters with and adoption of Japanese techniques “hastened the birth of abstraction.” But why did these techniques draw the attention of Manet, Degas, Van Gogh? The massive catalogue Japonisme, by Siegfried Wichmann, carefully traces each line of influence, but says only a little about this most important question. Did artists feel they had exhausted the formal possibilities of naturalism, and saw in Japanese aesthetics new forms for them to explore? If so, their interest in Japanese aesthetics was purely “internal.” But psycho-historical motives were also possible. Perhaps these artists had new things to say or express, and existing conventions were not well-suited for their expression; and perhaps Japanese aesthetics was.
On the internal/formal side, Wichmann observes that
In European art over the centuries there can be detected successive new beginnings in the depiction of movement and posture, but on each occasion what was originally fluency has settled down again into renewed rigidity.
Degas was searching for a new fluency, and found models for it in Hokusai. Indeed, the foreground figure in his Dancers with double-bass takes her pose from a Hokusai drawing:
Wichmann also mentions an external motive: the rigid, formal poses Degas rejected were associated with “the plutocratic prestige portrait”: a genre of the wealthy, for the wealthy. Ordinary people were no less worthy subjects, and dynamic, momentary glimpses of their behind-the-scenes activities no less beautiful.
Van Gogh wrote to his brother that “In a way, all my work is founded on Japanese art.” Klaus Berger, in Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse, claims that Van Gogh’s interest was in its expressive capabilities:
he used Japanese techniques in order to express what was closest to his own heart.
Van Gogh painted his own versions of Japanese prints. Hiroshige’s Plum Tree in Bloom:
became Van Gogh’s The Tree (after Hiroshige).
The pairing show clearly that Van Gogh aimed not to reproduce Japanese art, but to use its features for his own ends. Hiroshige’s print is not serene, but has its own kind of balance; Van Gogh’s strains against all control. Despite the Japanese tendency toward abstraction, Hiroshige’s print retains a strong interest in the natural world. Not so the Van Gogh, where the tree limbs and branches are a means to the display of the an inner emotion:
The exaggeration of the graphic arabesque, and the dense, ungradated, masses of paint, combine to destroy the Japanese equilibrium between drawn framework and rhythmic colour. The result is a kind of explosion that opens the way to Expressionism. The gnarled black bough screams aloud; the scattered blossoms are trapped between those fateful black tracks and the red wall of the sky. Whereas in the Japanese work everything expands into space, here it is confined, shut off, dramatically exaggerated. The curves and the verticals seem to fight each other, and the green configuration below thrusts against the upper red quarter, conveying the suspense of a conflict that still hangs in the balance.
Berger concludes,
[Van Gogh’s] true and exclusive debt to the Japanese does not lie in the motifs he adopted but in the influence of their way of seeing, not by way of imitation but in the realization that traditional illusionism can be relativized and broken through, and that behind it another reality emerges which makes it possible to express the psychic realm with greater accuracy.
See also: On Georgia O’Keeffe; Hitchcock / Van Gogh.