Word: japanism
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...collector, Monet had a sharp eye. Though he never went to Japan, he befriended writers, curators and art dealers who did, and they steered him toward quality. His treasures, all hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e - "images of the floating world" of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well...
...works. But if you're wondering how the prints inspired him, you need only descend one floor to the museum's main holdings. There you will see why Monet is hailed as one of art's more inventive geniuses. But you may have to look closely to discern how Japan made him that...
...moved in 1883 at age 42, he built a Japanese bridge over a Japanese pond in a Japanese garden, and he spent the rest of his life painting that private paradise - and especially its water lilies. But like the tale of the food shop, the reality of how Japan influenced Monet is elusive, subtle and obscured by embellishment...
...biographers offer wildly varying accounts of that first, life-altering Japanese print he bought: it was in Amsterdam, or Delft or Zaandam; at a food shop or a porcelain store; it was being used as wrapping paper or hanging on a wall. Monet himself recalled: "My true discovery of Japan, the purchase of my first prints, dates from 1856. I was 16. I spotted them at Le Havre, in a shop that dealt in curiosities brought back by foreign travelers." But even here the timing is suspect, improbably soon after Japan's opening to the West...
More rewarding is to speculate about how art opened Monet to Japan. Printmaking is a more cumbersome and less forgiving process than painting, so Japanese artists developed a remarkable economy of expression. Utamaro, for instance, could with a mere line or two describe the course of a river or the fullness of a women's breast. Thus could Monet - in Impression, Sunrise (1873), the painting that gave Impressionism its name - conjure up a boat with a mere squiggle of the brush...