“Japanism, a French art”, by Sophie Basch: the metamorphoses of the gaze

2023-08-05 19:00:11
Postcard by illustrator Georges Ferdinand Bigot (1900). PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Japanism, a French art”, by Sophie Basch, Les Presses du réel, 558 p., €32.

The term “Japanism” most often refers to the enthusiasm for the arts of Japan which took hold of Europe and America from the opening of the country to Western powers in 1854, until its entry into the concert of nations in 1905, after his victory against the Russian Empire. This movement gave birth to a form of art history that tracks Japanese influences on both sides of the Atlantic. In Japan, once re-imported, it serves as a reminder of what artistic modernity owes to local artists.

Sophie Basch, in Japonism, a French art, a book as erudite as it is funny, ingeniously illustrated, rejects this reductive definition, recounting the genealogy of a metamorphosis of the gaze which had Paris as its center. A note placed at the threshold of his essay sets the tone: “This book is not about Japan but about France. » Oscar Wilde the precursor affirmed it as early as 1891: “Besides, all of Japan is a pure invention. Such a country and such a nation do not exist. » The French history of Japonism proves him right.

Killer Formulas

Sophie Basch traces the trajectory of this word, since its invention in 1872, in the pages of the journal The literary and artistic Renaissance, by Philippe Burty, Protestant, Republican and Anglophile art critic. This neologism is born without definition. The first appeared in 1875, in English and then in French. Ten years later, his parent will speak of a “new field of artistic, historical and ethnographic study”.

Throughout the pages, an extraordinary concert of artists, amateurs and critics compete in erudition and murderous formulas to demonstrate that the arts of Japan are, at bottom, only a witch-mirror in which Western modernity appears distorted. Wiped fresh by the blade of Hokusai (1760-1849), all the great French artistic quarrels took on new colors. For the space of half a century, the defenders of Japonisme turned creation upside down, fueled aesthetic debates and conquered the general public.

Sophie Basch adopted the formula of Jules de Goncourt in 1869, for whom this enthusiasm for Japan was a “optical revolution” where Western art was impregnated with a new otherness. It had also been the manifestation of a taste for monsters, such as those of Clémence d’Ennery (1823-1898), or even the source of brilliant pastiches, such as The Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1896-1902), by Henri Rivière. A caustic story of a French vogue, a formidable anthology of art criticism until the 1920s, this book also constitutes the catalog of nearly 250 images of an amateur cabinet worthy of the pages of Georges Perec.