Imagining modernity: European Japonism and Japanese Westernism

This dissertation examines a specific set of cultural relations between Western Europe and Japan, two regions which did not share any common history until the middle of the sixteenth century when a strictly controlled trade started between them. Eighteenth-century Westernism in Japan and nineteenth-century Japonism, in France are viewed as parallel cultural phenomena involving literature and the visual arts yet born out of the material flow of commercial exchange (lenses and optical instruments from Europe, lacquer and porcelain from China and Japan). Besides surveying their multiple sources, the study aims to frame cultural exchange in terms other than interpretation and incommensurability. It demonstrates that both Japonism and Westernism entail the simultaneous presence of paradigms characteristic of the two cultural zones, which are respectively mimesis and instrumentalism of signs (the belief that the way signs perform determines the adequacy of representation) in the West, and repetition and juxtaposition in Japan. Showing how perspective (mimesis) can be perceived as an art of juxtaposed space, the study traces its migration from Dutch painters to Japanese woodblock artists (Westernism) and analyzes Edouard Manet's treatment of space in response to Japanese prints. On the other hand, in fashioning their styles after the West's instrumentalism, Shiba Kokan, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige practice the juxtaposition of space and repetition of shapes. James McNeill Whistler's work, situated on the blurred borderline between decorative art and painting, serves to show that the movement across cultural boundaries affects the distinction between high and low art. The relation between different art forms and artistic genres is discussed in reference to the Westernism of woodblock prints by Suzuki Harunobu and his use of classical poetry and to the Orientalism in some works by Manet and by Stephane Mallarme. With Mallarme black, a color cherished by Whistler and Manet in response to Japanese models, gains an esthetic dimension in the ideal of poetry as visual art. One aim of the dissertation is to indicate that those paradigms, while maintaining their autonomy, have the potential both to transgress regional boundaries and to be used as general critical tools.