Art Reviews

1. ART REVIEWS
ART REVIEWS; In New Jersey, a Permanent Japonisme
Display
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: July 8, 1994
New Jersey art museums within easy striking distance of Manhattan offer a number of low-key
rewards this summer. The Newark Museum is host to a cluster of offbeat mini-shows, from
contemporary American to South Asian art. Jersey City Museum's airy space on the top floor of
the city's public library is filled with the vital work of six young sculptors. And the Jane
Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick has recently
inaugurated the first-ever permanent display devoted to the international aesthetic movement
known as Japonisme. New Brunswick
The Kusakabe-Griffis Japonisme Gallery documents a formative though still little-explored
chapter in modern art history, the period from the mid-19th to early-20th century when Japan
and the West were first engaged in fertile cultural exchange.
Much of that exchange was socio-economic in origin: Japan, after opening its doors to trade in
1853, was getting its first crack at Western-style industrial progress, while the West was
gaining access to an exotic foreign market. Nowhere did this venture have greater immediate
impact than on art. On the Japanese side, woodblock prints by artists like Hiroshige quickly
began incorporating details of Western culture, from stovepipe hats to locomotives, while
advanced European painters, Manet and Van Gogh among them, seized upon the formal
properties of Japanese art as a way to break the grip of Western academic tradition.
It should be said right away that none of the work in the Rutgers Japonisme collection is of
"masterpiece" calibre. Among its paintings and drawings, prints and posters, books and
photographs can be found works by a few high-profile figures (Mary Cassatt and Toulouse-
Lautrec are represented by some graphic work; Frank Lloyd Wright by a stained-glass
window), but most of the Western artists are notable primarily as textbook exemplars of
Japonisme itself.
Yet from this non stellar, often ephemeral material, the Zimmerli's director, Phillip Dennis
Cate, has shaped a telling study in cultural history. One of the installation's very first images
gives a taste of the fascinating crossbreeding to come. It is an 1885 Japanese woodblock
portrait of Kukuchi Genichiro, editor of the country's first newspaper. The print's technical
execution is traditional, as is the pretty landscape of mountains and lakes it depicts. But
Genichiro himself is like nothing Japanese art has seen before: he is a rakish figure dressed in
a natty checked tweed suit, knee-high boots and a beret like floppy black hat.

2. This portrait was intended as a positive emblem of Westernization (the title of the woodblock
series from which it comes is "Self-Made Men Worthy of Emulation"), though Japanese
depictions of Westerners themselves are sometimes unmistakably derisive. This is certainly
true of Utagawa Yoshitoro's print "English Couple" (1861), with its simian-looking bearded
merchant dominated by a towering, umbrella-wielding wife in pantaloons.
Western artists display a similar mix of admiration, disdain and incomprehension in their
adaptations of Japanese culture. In a famous poster of a black-dressed Jane Avril, Toulouse-
Lautrec forges a daring emblem of modernity from the flat planes and solid colours of
Japanese prints. By contrast, Philippe Burty, who coined the term "Japonisme" in 1872, turns
images of Noh masks into cartoons, and Helen Hyde, one of several American artists who
studied in Japan, makes sentimentalized kitsch from what were presumably first-hand
observations. Her work is a reminder that while some innovative Westerners used Japanese art
to radicalize their vision, others sought the romantic images of pre-industrial serenity that this
long-sequestered island nation was imagined to embody.
The Kusakabe-Griffis Japonisme Gallery (named for America's first Japanese college student,
who enrolled at Rutgers in 1867, and for his English tutor) provides substantial evidence for all
these points of view. It puts the good, the bad and the ugly side by side in a richly textured,
stimulating exhibition that anyone interested in the shaping of 19th-century European
modernism and in East Asian art will want to see. Newark
Work of the 19th century also plays a significant part in "Gods and Goddesses in Indian Art" at
the Newark Museum, a small gathering of South Asian sculptures and paintings from the
museum's holdings.
Among the remarkable pieces is a late-19th-century hollow metal head of the god Shiva from
southern India. With its large, intense eyes and fantastically decorated, winglike ears, it was
created to be carried in religious processions. From the same century, from Rajasthan, comes a
large painting on unstretched cotton of women worshipping Krishna. Every element in the
composition is symmetrical, yet the brilliantly coloured palm groves and peacocks set under a
star-filled autumn sky are vibrant with spiritual animation.
Splendid older pieces are also on view: the ninth-century goddess Parvati swaying to the
rhythm of unheard dance music is one; a striking four-headed Brahma carved in wood
another. But it is the 19th-century works that prove of particular interest. They represent a
period only beginning to get serious scholarly attention and they give clear evidence of ancient
traditions perpetuated and transformed in the present.
The California artist John Baldessari has done his share of transforming traditions, too. His
photograph-and-text-based conceptual work has had considerable influence on contemporary

3. art since the early 1970's, and "John Baldessari: Four Directional Pieces" at Newark offers a
small sampling of his output from the last three decades.
The earliest work, "A Movie" (1972-73), is pretty much clever absurdist fun. It consists of 28
old film stills arranged on the wall as a large spiral, dictated by the direction of the glances of
the main characters -- Hollywood femmes fatales, gangsters and cowboys -- in each of the film
stills.
"Flying Saucers" (1992), with its fragmented shots of ruined buildings and Santa Monica
bicyclists, offers a bit more food for thought, and the enlarged magazine photos of snakes in
"Baudelaire Meets Poe" (1980) are genuinely creepy. The low visual wattage of this artist's
work, however, remains a problem. Even at their most dynamic, his images tend to fade
quickly from memory (it has often been said that he is more interesting for the work he has
inspired in others than for the work he has done himself). But the Newark's carefully chosen
exhibition shows him at his most varied and engaging. Jersey City
The Jersey City Museum also offers contemporary work. Of two shows on view this summer,
Felice Nudelman's solo exhibition of photography has some memorable moments. The
opening image, titled "Allegory," of a woman's distorted face in profile is mysterious and
disturbing, but the numerous murky-looking desert vistas that follow fail to convey a similar
charge. Only "Cathedral Lake," whose great glowing oval of light could be either a cloud in the
sky or a body of water, shows how good a landscape photographer Ms. Nudelman can be.
The group show of sculpture also has its distinct ups and downs. The attraction of John
Parris's visual puns (oxygen tanks made of Styrofoam, suspended in midair) pretty much
begins and ends with their snappy colours, and Nancy Cohen's pod like sculptures, despite
evidence of the artist's nice way with materials, never get beyond suggesting 3-D refugees from
old Terry Winters paintings.
Less technically resolved but more gripping are Lorenzo Pace's homages to the writer James
Baldwin. The strongest, titled "Go Tell It on the Mountain" after Baldwin's book, brings
together a battered church pew, a fan from an Alabama funeral home, a pair of beat-up high
heels and an African-style sculpture to suggest the personal conflicts and cultural layering
found in Mr. Baldwin's fiction.
Conflict of a certain theatrical kind is the entire substance of China Marks's grotesque plaster
figures. Her tormented, often demonic creatures bring Hans Bellmer to mind, but the Rococo
eroticism evident here is little more than audacious fluff. Better is Stephen Schofield's
unassuming abstract work, also Surrealist in flavor. His fat little floor sculptures, combining
silk, chiffon and cement and looking like cushions stuffed to the point of bursting, keep the eye
coming back and invite hands-on investigation. Like Mr. Pace, Mr. Schofield is a talent worth
following, and the Jersey City Museum does well to bring him to our attention.

4. Photo: Toulouse-Lautrec's "Divan Japonais" (1893), part of the Zimmerli Museum's
Japonisme exhibition, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. (Jane Voorhees/Zimmerli
Art Museum)
Japanese Art
By GREGORY COWLES
Published: December 4, 2005
Part of the charm of Japanese prints is their apparent simplicity - the clean lines, the rich
colours, the traditional focus on animals or landscapes or beautiful women. Like the best comic
books or advertising posters, these things pop.
A courtesan and apprentice, by Hokusai, from "Ukiyo-E."
A lithograph of 1890- 91, from "Japonisme."

5. A night view of Edo by Keisai Eisen (from "Ukiyo-E").
A 19th-century Vietnamese Buddha, from "The Arts of Asia."
But as with Hemingway's sentences, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. Every woodblock
print is the result of an elaborate collaboration, with segments of the artist's original sketch
carved onto a series of cherry wood blocks, one for each colour, then inked and layered
carefully onto paper to create the final product. That so mechanical and tactile a process can
yield so ethereal an image is one of the subtler pleasures of Japanese prints, and one of the
reasons to celebrate the steady stream of recent books offering high-quality reproductions.
This year, the place to start has to be Gian Carlo Calza's UKIYO-E (Phaidon) , a lavish
collection of some 600 prints dating mostly from the late Edo period (1615-1868). The title
translates to "the floating world," a catchall phrase for the transitory images these printmakers
tried to capture: a bird lighting on a branch, a mother and daughter catching fireflies, the
imposing Mount Fuji glowing red in the early dawn. Work from all the Edo masters is here,
including probably the most famous Japanese print of all time: Hokusai's "Great Wave" (1830-
32), with its stylized crest like cappuccino foam.
Readers more familiar with the Christmas-card version of "The Great Wave," which
superimposes a little Santa Claus hanging ten on the wave's peak, may be interested in
JAPONISME: Cultural Crossings Between Japan and the West (Phaidon), edited by
Lionel Lambourne. The book traces the cross-pollination between Japan and the West after the
"bamboo curtain" fell in 1858, opening Japan to foreign trade and ending more than 200 years
of self-imposed isolation. The result was a Western fad for all things Japanese. Lambourne
provides a series of fascinating side-by-side comparisons to show the influence of Japanese
prints on Degas, Cassatt, Monet and especially van Gogh, whose "Bridge in the Rain" is a direct
copy of Hiroshige's great "Sudden Shower Over the Shin-Ohashi Bridge." Later chapters
broaden the comparison to include advertising, furniture and the decorative arts.

6. An all-encompassing approach is also on display in THE ARTS OF ASIA: Materials,
Techniques, Styles (Thames and Hudson, $50), by Meher McArthur, a curator at Pacific Asia
Museum in Pasadena, Calif. McArthur's book is organized by material (the "very substance of
the art," the author says in her introduction), with chapters on jade, silk, porcelain and so on,
and includes examples from throughout Asia and throughout history, ranging from Han dynasty
China to 20th-century Indonesia. The subject is so vast that all this book can hope to do is give
a little taste, but with so much to admire, sometimes a little taste is exactly what you want.