Influence of Japanese Prints

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the way in which Japanese printmaking, especially ukiyo-e prints, allowed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, to depart from the "photographic realism" that was part of European painting before photography was invented. The paper also includes some images of the Japanese prints, as well as images of the work of some of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.

The Influence of Japanese Woodblock Prints and Western Photography
The Artists Themselves
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Ukiyo-e prints had something in common with the also increasingly popular photograph; neither one allowed the superficial depth of an oil painting or even a pastel. In addition, both media "the woodblock of the Japanese print and the paper and emulsion of the photography" produced relatively sharp edges compared to those produced by paint, and particularly by paint as used by the Impressionists, in more freehand style than had ever been seen before. So, at exactly the time that French artists, the Impressionists, had finally gotten away from the formalism that had marked the previous centuries of fine arts, two influences arrived to return some formality to the practice of art. In the case of photography, it was a simplistic realism produced by the rudimentary equipment that could not, at that point, capture nuance quite as well as modern photography can. Until the Impressionists, realism has been the aim of western artists, especially since the discovery of perspective in Italy during the Renaissance. While the definition of objects in photography was, obviously, realistic, the expression of them on the paper often was reduced almost to abstraction, with the necessarily highly contrasting lights and darks produced by early techniques and equipments. The very pronounced areas of positive and negative mimicked what could be produced by the Japanese woodblock ukiyo-e printing process. And that, in turn, influenced composition, even after the interesting experiments of Gauguin as well as Cassatt's mode d'emploi of the dry-point and aquatint techniques."

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• Research Paper # 94335 : "Japanese Prints and the Impressionists"

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