[1]Download Vincent van Gogh's Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which
Inspired Him to Create "the Art of the Future" by Colin Marshall:
Vincent van Gogh never went to Japan, but he did spend quite a bit
of time in Arles, which he considered the Japan of France. What made
him think of the place that way had to do entirely with aesthetics.
The Netherlands-born painter had moved to Paris in 1886, but two
years later he set off for the south of France in hopes of finding
real-life equivalents of the "clearness of the atmosphere and the
gay colour effects" of Japanese prints. These days, we've all seen
at least a few examples of that kind of art and can imagine more or
less exactly what he was talking about. But how did the man who
painted Sunflowers and The Starry Night come to draw such
inspiration from what must have felt like such exotic art of such
distant a provenance?
"There was huge admiration for all things Japanese in the second
half of the nineteenth century," says the Van Gogh Museum's
[2]visual essay on the painter's relationship with Japan. "Very few
artists in the Netherlands studied Japanese art. In Paris, by
contrast, it was all the rage. So it was there that Vincent
discovered the impact Oriental art was having on the West, when he
decided to modernise his own art."
Having got a deal on about 660 Japanese woodcuts in the winter of
1886-87, apparently with an intent to trade them, he ultimately held
on to them, copied them, and even used their elements as backgrounds
for his own portraits.
"My studio's quite tolerable," he wrote to his brother Theo, "mainly
because I've pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls that I
find very diverting. You know, those little female figures in
gardens or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, gnarled thorn branches."
More than a diversion, he saw in their radical difference from the
rigorously realistic, convention-bound traditional European painting
a way toward "the art of the future," which he was convinced "had to
be colourful and joyous, just like Japanese printmaking." As he
developed what he called a "Japanese eye" while living in Arles,
"his compositions became flatter, more intense in colour, with clear
lines and decorative patterns."
The Van Gogh Museum has [3]digitized and made available to download
Van Gogh's Japanese art collection, or at least most of them: you
can [4]read about the hundred or so "missing" works here, and you
can [5]view the 500 the museum has retained here. Every time you
reload the front page, the selection it presents reshuffles;
otherwise, you can browse the collection by subject, person and
institution, technique, object type, and style. Some of the
best-represented categories include [6]landscape, [7]actor print,
[8]spring, and [9]female beauty. Whether the Japan-inspired Van Gogh
(or colleagues who shared his interest, chiefly Paul Gauguin)
succeeded in creating the art of the future is up to art historians
to debate, but no one who sees [10]his collection of Japanese art
will ever be able to unsee its influence on his own work. Not that
Van Gogh didn't admit it himself: "All my work," he wrote in a later
letter to Theo, "is based to some extent on Japanese art."
Related Content:
[11]Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now
Digitized and Put Online: View/Download the Collection
[12]The Van Gogh of Microsoft Excel: How a Japanese Retiree Makes
Intricate Landscape Paintings with Spreadsheet Software
[13]Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock
Prints
Based in Seoul, [14]Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities,
language, and culture. His projects include the book _The Stateless
City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles _and the video series
_[15]The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at [16]@colinmarshall
or on [17]Faceboo[18]k._
This is wonderful.
__________________________________________________________________
My original entry is here: [19]Download Vincent van Gogh's Collection
of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create "the Art of the
Future". It posted Fri, 22 Mar 2019 13:25:38 +0000.
Filed under: culture, Japan,
References
1.
http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/download-vincent-van-goghs-collection-of-japanese-prints.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+OpenCulture+(Open+Culture)
2.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-japan#0
3.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints?v=1
4.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints/missing-prints
5.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints?v=1
6.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints/subject/11366/landscape-(fūkeiga)
7.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints/subject/11373/actor-print-(yakusha-e)
8.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints/subject/4095/spring
9.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints/subject/11375/female-beauty-(bijinga)
10.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/japanese-prints?v=1
11.
http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/nearly-1000-paintings-drawings-vincent-van-gogh-now-digitized-put-online-view-download-collection.html
12.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-van-gogh-of-microsoft-excel.html
13.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/enter-a-digital-archive-of-213000-beautiful-japanese-woodblock-prints.html
14.
http://blog.colinmarshall.org/
15.
https://vimeo.com/channels/thecityincinema
16.
https://twitter.com/#!/colinmarshall
17.
https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist
18.
https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist
19.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2564
