Originating Japanism

Challenges the gender dynamics of conventional histories of Japanism that retroactively privilege avant-garde artists over bachelor collectors and the female dealer who was arguably the first japoniste. It examines three paradigmatic Japanist spaces in 19th-century Paris, all bachelor quarters. Henri Cernuschi’s house-museum, which frames artifacts from East Asia in an architecture redolent of Italian-inflected Enlightenment values, is now the museum of Asian art of the City of Paris. The Goncourt brothers’ house is famous as a model of Aesthetic domesticity. Hugues Krafft’s zashiki, imported from Japan, and its extensive Japanese gardens was an important site for Parisians interested in Japan.

Introduction

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. … The Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. —Oscar Wilde If I want to imagine a fictive nation, … I can … isolate somewhere in the world (...

Sublimation and Eccentricity in the art of Mark Tobey

Follows the career of artist Mark Tobey, whose long-standing interest in Japan exemplifies twentieth-century Western trends toward fascination with Zen Buddhism, rustic Japanese pottery, and calligraphy. Tobey’s career intersects in illuminating ways with very well known figures – the artist John Cage, the potter Bernard Leach, the critic Clement Greenberg – allowing this chapter to explore the impact of World War and Cold War on Japanism. The chapter concludes with an argument connecting initiatives to integrate Japanese-Americans into the cultural mainstream with the end of Japanism as a structure of dissent.

Conclusion

By 1965, the very visible realities of imperialism, immigration, World War, and Cold War diminished Japanism’s viability as a mode of what, in the introduction, I call an “unlearning” of the West. Of course, this did not happen all at once or completely.1 As with the nineteenth-century shift from the kinds of stylistically conventional depictions of Japan exemplified by Mortimer Menpes’s paintings to Japanist subversions of Western representational conventions, new and old paradigms can coexist, especially where there is a taste for the old-fashioned. But change has come, and that cannot be regretted. Notwithstanding the brilliance of Wilde or Barthes, the appeal of the houses and museums that constituted spaces of Japanism in the West, the sublimations enabled by Western practices of art or spirituality that drew from Zen Buddhism, or the opportunities created for individual Japanese like Okakura by dynamics termed ...

Bachelor Brahmins

Explores the collecting and exhibition practices of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which set a standard for the display of Asian art in museums worldwide. Scholars such as Edward Morse and Ernest Fenollosa, funded by “Brahmin” patron-scholars such as William Sturgis Bigelow and Percival Lowell, provoked European Japanists into debates over the authenticity and excellence of Japanese prints and ceramics that foregrounded the Bostonians’ creation of a canon of Japanese art and religion associated with masculine aristocracy. Challenges to these gendered hierarchies came in the form of novels and, most dramatically, from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection of East Asian art, closed to the public and dispersed after her death.