Generieke en specifieke teksten cse 2012, vwo - Examenblad.nl

In de negentiende eeuw ontstond er onder leiding van Frankrijk een ware manie rondom
alles wat Japans was. Japanse kunstnijverheid vierde triomfen op de tentoonstellingen in
London (1862) en Parijs (1876, 1878, 1889). Met beschrijvingen in catalogi van de Japanse
bijdragen aan Franse tentoonstellingen alleen al zijn boekenkasten te vullen. Ontelbare
schilderijen van vrouwen in kimono’s, vervaardigd aan het einde van de negentiende eeuw,
staan symbool voor een Japancultus die ook zichtbaar werd in talloze romans, opera’s en
toneelstukken.
The establishment of tea shops contributed to public knowledge of Far Eastern ways
and was yet another manifestation of the general trend of the times. It became the
rigueur for every Parisian store to have Japanese (but also Chinese) departments.
Toulouse-Lautrec valued Japanese hanging scrolls (kakemono) as highly as he did
Japanese netsuke (small carved figures used as stoppers). Maurice Joyant describes
his studio as containing ‘an extraordinary number of Japanese objets d'art, kakemono
and netsuki'. And the Dutch Art Nouveau artist Jan Toorop wrote: ‘The East is the
foundation of my work! This ... [was] my first contact with beauty.'
Bron: Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme, The Japanese influence on Western art since
1858, 1981, p. 9
Wichmann geeft in zijn boek voor de verschillende disciplines van de kunst aan waar de
‘waarde’ van de Japanse kunst voor westerse kunstenaars lag. Deze waardering verschoof
door de jaren heen. Kenmerkend voor deze waardering is dat westerse kunstenaars,
architecten en ontwerpers al gauw trachtten de wezenlijke elementen van deze vreemde
culturen zich eigen te maken. Hieronder volgt Wichmanns beschrijving van de Japanse
invloed op de schilderkunst van het Westen in het laatste kwart van de negentiende eeuw.
The enormous swing away from the imitative and photographic and towards the
decorative as a valid artistic means, was probably the greatest gain attributable to the
impact of Far Eastern art. The abandonment of the dark modelling and sombre tonal
values of academic painting in favour of a light with no shadows gave European artists
a new relationship to reality. The acceptance in the West, from the Renaissance
onwards, of central perspective with a fixed viewpoint and a vanishing point had
created a gap between Western and Eastern concepts of space, but this now began to
close again, as the example of Eastern art showed that the Western illusion of
perspectival depth need play no part in pictorial composition. Japonisme provided some
of the central concepts of twentieth-century modernism, for it introduced new and
astonishing angles of vision – from below, from above – and the separation of planes
by a strong diagonal, combined with the framing function of truncated foreground
shapes. The tall, narrow formats of Japanese hanging scrolls and ‘pillar pictures’
suggested new ways of organizing the picture plane with objects cutting across the field
of vision, apparently quite arbitrarily, yet subject to a scrupulous compositional order.
This crossing of the boundaries of pictorial perception revolutionized the Impressionists’
composition and made it boundless.The French Impressionists experimented with the
tall narrow format; but it was in certain areas of Art Nouveau that it came to constitute
the very nature of the painting. Instead of the Impressionist illusion of depth the
composition is stacked in a series of layers and levels, towards the top edge of the
picture. Height signifies space as well, and space – perspectival space at least – is an
illusion. By stacking objects upwards in tall compositions under the influence of Far
Eastern models, European painters introduced a clarifying element which either brings
all the forms forwards to the surface of the picture plane or momentarily allows them to
float in an ‘unspatial space’, a foil which can be sensed as extending in all directions
(floating space).
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