Rats eating a fish head, Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889), Musée Guimet • RMN/SERVICE DE PRESSE Contrary to popular belief, the isolation of Japan from 1639 to 1854 was not absolute. In 1641, the Dutch received exclusive European commercial presence in the country, thanks to the construction of an artificial island, Dejima, off Nagasaki. Exchanges of prized products, such as silk or porcelain from Arita and Imari, were established there with the West, while the Dutch introduced exotic European objects into the Japanese archipelago, in particular treatises on painting. . This is how we find, in certain Japanese prints, the use of Western artistic rules (vanishing point perspective, etc.), and how rich Europeans became collectors, such as Queen Marie-Antoinette, who takes a passion for Japanese lacquers. A mutual discovery The advent of the Meiji era in 1868 shifted these relationships to an unprecedented dimension. Japan and the West embark on a mutual discovery. This translates, in Europe and the United States, into a massive craze for Japanese objects, which culminates at the end of the 19 th century. This fashion, called "japanism", affects collectors and all the arts, from Monet, painting in 1876 La Japonaise. Madame Monet in a kimono , to Puccini, who made Madame Butterfly sing her despair in the eponymous opera of 1904. Literature, from the Goncourt brothers to Proust, and especially the decorative arts did not escape this exotic frenzy:furniture, vases and Japanese screens, adorned with flowers, birds, fish, invade bourgeois interiors. In painting, it is ukiyo-e – the popular art of Japanese prints representing a moment of everyday life – which would play a major role with the Parisian avant-gardes. The artists buy these typical productions in stalls like that of Father Tanguy. This is where Van Gogh, a great lover of Japanese art, gets his supplies; moreover, in 1887 he painted a famous portrait of the boss surrounded by prints from his unmissable shop. Manet painted the portrait of his friend, the writer Émile Zola in 1868; alongside the latter:a print and a Japanese style screen. An unconventional art From the Impressionists to the Nabis, what fascinates the avant-gardes so much to affect their art in this way? Like the discovery of primitive arts at the beginning of the XX th century, that of Japanese art calls into question the fixed rules of academicism and confuses Western pictorial conventions. The importance of the fluid line and the simplification of the design of the prints inspire the schematic and expressive characters of Toulouse-Lautrec; as for Bonnard, he resumed the treatment of colors by flat tints, without modelling, for the clothes of his characters. From Degas to Mary Cassatt, each incorporates in their own way, in their practice, an aspect of this art to reinvent their style and shake up the norms.
