Looking East

This exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has a rich collection of Western paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts inspired by contact with Japanese art and culture during a key period of cross-cultural exchange between East and West: from Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s 1854 landing in Edo Bay (now Tokyo) and the opening of Japanese trade to the beginning of the twentieth century. The period witnessed an explosion of interest in all things Japanese and a correspondingly radical shift in Western artistic styles, dubbed “Japonisme” by the Parisian critic Philippe Burty in 1872. Japonisme was particularly strong in France and America, where it was instrumental to the development of modern art by such celebrated figures as Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt, whose work is featured in the exhibition. Artists looking to the East incorporated the imagery and compositional devices of their Japanese peers, including asymmetry, decorative patterning, planar blocks of color, and calligraphic gesture. These artists also borrowed from each other and from a variety of Western traditions, melding Eastern artistic elements into highly original creations, ranging from Edouard Manet’s bold view of cats on a city rooftop to a delicate Tea Caddy with mouse, dragonfly, and leaf motifs from the Gorham Manufacturing Company. The exhibition explores the themes of inspiration, incorporation, and transmutation of motifs and styles that occured as European and American artists encountered the East through Japanese export—often tailored to a Western audience—and travel. This fine selection of exceptional works from the Museum of Fine Arts brings to life an artistic exchange with extraordinary results: a revolutionary shift in how Western artists have interpreted the modern world.