Marie Nordlinger and the Bings

The essay traces the role of Marie Nordlinger (1876-1961) against her ties with Siegfried Bing, Marcel Bing, Marcel Proust and Charles Lang Freer. Nordlinger first worked in the ateliers of art nouveau later becoming a confidante of the Bings who helped sell Japanese prints in the United States especially to Charles Lang Freer when she visited the country.

From Book to Film

Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s 1906 novel The Dragon Painter and its 1919 filmic adaptation sit at the intersection of American literary, art, and film history. Simultaneously personal and political, each is a product of its time and place. Together, they tell a story about changing (and unchanging) attitudes that were constituents of the complex and often contradictory history of the reception of Japanese culture and people in the United States. The novel draws on stereotypes of Japan as a primitive country of innately artistic people that at the time of its publication had been made familiar through art and literature. The silent film, produced in Hollywood, by and co-starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki, expanded and complicated the modes of visualizing Japan by featuring a Japanese couple in starring roles. This article addresses the relationship between the novel, an allegory of Japanese cultural loss and renewal, and the film, a romance inflected with American concerns about race, drawing particular attention to gender and Japanism in their reception and interpretation.

A Japoniste Friendship in Translation: Hayashi Tadamasa and Philippe Burty (1878–1890)

Art critic and collector Philippe Burty (1830–1890) was one of the first friends the Japanese interpreter (and future art dealer) Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–1906) made on arrival in Paris in 1878. The previously unknown letters translated into English within this essay present Hayashi’s work in Paris (1878) and Brussels (1880), his first impressions of Normandy (1882) and New York (1886), and his explanation of the evolution of Japanese painting (1885). They furnish valuable insights into the cross-cultural aesthetics that led the Japanese, the French, the British, the German, and Americans to collaborate in the development of the phenomenon now known as Japonisme, thereby filling in some of the information gaps surrounding Burty’s international networks and Hayashi’s early years in Europe.

Japan at the World’s Fairs: A Reflection

The primary purpose of world’s fairs was commercial and industrial, focused on the celebration of technical and material progress. At the same time, they were places of immaterial exchanges between exhibitors and visitors, all of whom contributed a diversity of customs and cultures. As major exhibitions developed in Europe (1850–1900), Japan was opening to Western influences after a centuries-old period of self-isolation. The advent of the Meiji era marked the decision to transform feudal Japan into a modern capitalist state; in order to find economic partners, Japan became a regular presence at the world’s fairs. Openness gave way to confluence: European visitors discovered a living, rich image of Japan, complete with its traditions and arts. The revelation, to a wider audience, of Japanese art was at the origin of an artistic movement – Japonisme – which would have a lasting influence on European artists. Japan’s regular contributions to world’s fairs, especially those in Paris (1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900), enjoyed great popular success and shaped the European understanding of, and taste for, Japanese arts and culture.