Japonisme/Europeanisme

In the course of this blog, I often use the word Japonisme, as a way of encapsulating the rejuvenating, electrifying effect that exposure to Japanese art and aesthetics had on European artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist era. One of the first blogs I started to follow was Lily's Japonisme, which has remained a source of great value to me. The meaning of the word Japonisme can best be shown visually, perhaps by looking at this colour autolithograph by Henri Rivière (1864-1951).

Henri Rivière, Brume matinale (Matin de brume à Loguivy)

Lithograph, 1903

But was Japonisme a one-way street, with European artists learning from the Japanese, and the Japanese going on their own sweet way? Of course not. Japanese artists were as eager to learn from the West as European artists were to learn from the East. Here is an example of what I mean, a modernist female nude by Kiyoshi Hasegawa (Hasegawa Kiyoshi, as it should be in Japanese convention). I think this is a wonderful piece of work, a machine age nude rather than an Art Deco one.

Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Femme nue

Engraving, 1929

Kiyoshi Hasegawa was born in Yokohama in 1891. He moved to Paris alongside fellow Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita, and spent most of his life there, working in a Western style deeply influenced by the subtlety of line and feeling in Japanese art. I have to admit I don't know the precise dates at which Foujita and Hasegawa arrived in Paris, but I have a strong feeling that Foujita got there first, and that Hasegawa was always therefore second fiddle to his compatriot. Western influences on Hasegawa's work include Jean Laboureur and Jules Pascin. Hasegawa's prints are primarily engravings and mezzotints. He died in 1980. In 2005 the Yokohama Museum of Art received over 1000 items from the Paris atelier of Kiyoshi Hasegawa.

Light and shadow

The post-Impressionist Benjamin Jean Pierre Henri Rivière (1864-1951) is the French artist who above all others absorbed the aesthetics of Japanese art into his own. He is known especially for his woodcuts and lithographs of scenes in Brittany and Paris. Rivière first visited Brittany in 1884, and returned each summer until 1916. It was at this point that Rivière ceased exhibiting or publishing his work (his last print was published in 1917). My sole lithograph by Henri Rivière shows a scene in Perros-Guirec on the rose granite coast of Brittany. On the beach are massive boulders sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the tides, but Rivière ignores the monumental and the picturesque for the tranquillity of daily life. Rivière began as an etcher, moved on to woodcuts in the Japanese style (which he printed himself), and then turned to colour lithographs (which he entrusted to the master printer Eugène Verneau). This image is unusual in that he created it first as a woodcut, in 1891 as part of his unfinished series Les paysages Bretons, and then as a 9-colour lithograph, printed by Verneau for the art revue The Studio in 1896.

Henri Rivière, Le bourg de Perros-Guirec

Lithograph after a woodcut, 1896

Henri Rivière was born in Montmartre, and is in many ways the quintessential Parisian artist. Besides his graphic work, he also invented a form of shadow play, ombres chinoises, which was a speciality of the Chat Noir nightclub, and of which Henri Rivière and Caran d'Ache (Russian-born satirist Emmanuel Poiré, 1858-1909) were the chief exponents. I don’t have any example of Rivière’s silhouette images to show, but I do have two (also from The Studio) from Caran d’Ache’s celebrated shadow play on the Napoleonic Wars, L’Épopée (The Epic). These were printed on celluloid which has yellowed over time, but they still give an idea of the technique. For the actual play, the silhouettes were cut out of zinc and then projected onto a backlit screen—as much an early form of cinema as a kind of theatre. There’s apparently an excellent book on these plays, The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 by Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, but I haven’t yet seen it. The Musée d’Orsay has some 40 of the original zinc cut-outs.

Caran d'Ache, Two transparencies for L'Épopée

from The Studio, 1898