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Durham E-Theses The Y©okaiImagination of Symbolism: The Role of Japanese Ghost Imagery in late 19th & early 20th Century European Art Volumes I-III ROWE, SAMANTHA,SUE,CHRISTINA How to cite: ROWE, SAMANTHA,SUE,CHRISTINA (2015) The Y©okaiImagination of Symbolism: The Role of Japanese Ghost Imagery in late 19th & early 20th Century European Art Volumes I-III, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11477/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Yōkai Imagination of Symbolism: The Role of Japanese Ghost Imagery in late 19th & early 20th Century European Art Volumes I-III Samantha Sue Christina Rowe Volume I MA by Thesis School of Education (History of Art) University of Durham 2015 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 2 Contents Volume I Acknowledgements 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 6 Chapter I: Hyakki Yagyō - Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: The Japanese Ghost and Ghost Print 12 Chapter II: The Arrival and Dissemination of Japanese Art & Yōkai Prints in Western Europe 33 Chapter III: The Yōkai Imagination of Symbolism and Its Origins 47 Chapter IV: ‘Different Creatures inhabit the Countries of the Ocean’: 61 Odilon Redon and Japanese yōkai imagery Chapter V: ‘Soyez Mystérieuses’: Gauguin, Ghosts & Yōkai 78 Chapter VI: Yōkai Reflections in the Late 19th Century Design 94 Chapter VII: The Yōkai Imagination beyond France & Britain: Toorop, Delville and Ensor 106 Conclusion 117 Appendix I: Glossary of Japanese Terms 123 Appendix II: Glossary of Yōkai 125 Bibliography 133 Volume II: Illustrations Volume III: Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné of contemporary published sources on Japanese art and design up to 1924 3 Acknowledgements This dissertation is dedicated to Dr. Anthony Parton, who saw the wood for the trees and helped exorcise these demons. Dr. Parton provided unending support and guidance throughout; without whom, this dissertation would have remained just an idea. I would also like to give special thanks to Dr. Hazel Donkin for her continued professional and expert guidance. Finally I would like to sincerely thank my mother, sister and friend David for providing the necessary motivation and their, most valued, emotional support. Without these people, this dissertation would not exist. Thank you. 4 Abstract This dissertation explores the influence of the Japanese yōkai, or ghost, imagery upon late 19th and early 20th century Symbolist artists in Western Europe. Japanese yōkai imagery, which we find in diverse mediums such as Buddhist handscrolls, woodblock prints and netsuke, gave vivid expression to a long established belief in Japanese culture in the existence of a world of ghosts and demons existing on the thresholds and borders of material existence. Yōkai imagery represents a very distinctive genre in the visual arts of Japan and the purpose of this dissertation is to tease out the specific impact that this discrete form of imagery might have exerted upon the Symbolist imagination within the wider context of japonisme and japonaiserie in European modernism. The dissertation begins with an exploration of the concept of yōkai in Japanese culture and discusses the history of their representation in the visual arts. The second chapter turns attention to the availability of such representations to avant-garde artists particularly in France and Britain in the late 19th century. An exploration of the incidence of such yōkai imagery in private collections, exhibitions and in publications on Japanese art and culture shows that a distinctive ‘ghost’ genre was extant and accessible at this time to those artists who wished to exploit in their work. The third chapter explores the ways in which the Symbolist generation developed existing discourses on the ghostly and supernatural in European culture, why they should have engaged with this and suggests that Japanese yōkai imagery offered them an innovative, ‘exotic’ and more subtle vocabulary of discourse with which to reflect their experience of modernity. Case studies of Aubrey Beardsley, Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, the designers associated with Art Nouveau and artists such as Toorop, Delville and Ensor suggests that, to some extent, all these artists engaged with yōkai imagery in their own artistic practice. The dissertation concludes that evidence exists to show that this specific genre of Japanese art did, indeed, exert an impact upon Symbolist thought and practice in Western Europe and makes the case for further investigative study to confirm preliminary findings and to extend research into an area of art historical study that has hitherto been poorly researched and unappreciated. 5 Introduction In July 1924 Dr. Jean Vinchon, who was closely associated with the Surrealists, wrote an essay for the newly founded Revue des Arts Asiatiques entitled “Fantômes japonais”. This essay, as far as we know at present, represents the very first scholarly reflection upon one specific genre of Japanese art: the ghost print. In his essay Vinchon makes the claim, in passing, that these prints have, as he puts it “... inspired the origins of our modern art” (Vinchon, 1924: 22). He then cites as his example the work Aubrey Beardsley whose work, he says, clearly parallels the decorative feeling of the prints, their grace, the contrast of their formal techniques and employs the hieratic poses of the ghosts that they represent, which manifest in surprising and imaginative forms. To what extent did this genre of Japanese art impact upon late 19th and early 20th century artists in Europe? What distinctive contribution, if any, did it make? Why should Western European artists engage with it? It is questions such as these that this dissertation seeks to address. It is already well known and well documented that in late 19th century Europe a vogue for Japanese art and culture developed in Western Europe. This japonisme found expression across European society. Amongst the intelligentsia it became something to be studied, collected and exhibited. Amongst artists it became something which enabled them to engage with new forms of pictorial representation. In high society it stimulated new tastes in fashion and in music it provided the theme for Puccini’s music dramas on the one hand and the subject of popular operettas, such as Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), on the other. One of the key factors that stimulated this vogue for Japanese culture and objets d’art was that until the 1850s Japan had largely been cut off from the rest of the world by the isolationist policies of the Tokugawa shogun regime. In the early 19th century the Tokugawa gradually lost their hold on power in Japan and by the 1850s trade routes were beginning to open up between Japan and the rest of the world. With the collapse of the shogunate in 1868 and the restoration of the Meiji, Japan more formally ‘opened for business’ and began a process of modernisation. In this context Japanese art objects and specifically woodcut, or woodblock, prints flooded into Europe where they exerted a dramatic impact upon modernist artists such as Manet, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and many others. They offered these painters not only new and more expressive ways of thinking about image making but, owing to the fact that Japanese prints were considered to possess an 6 ‘exotic’ even ‘primitive’ quality, these sources permitted painters to develop a type of art that, because it was couched in the rhetoric of the Japanese print, itself emblematised those qualities. In short the Japanese print offered the modernist artist a means of opposing the cultural norms of the refined, bourgeois status quo, represented by the hide-bound rules and classicised subjects of the Royal Academy in London and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The Japanese woodcut print provided an inspirational avenue through which artists at the time could explore and express their experience of a rapidly modernising world from which, for the most part, they felt completely dislocated. There are several genres of Japanese woodcut print. Perhaps the most numerous are those known as bijin-ga or ‘portraits of beautiful women’, which represent, in the main, the geisha or courtesans. Shunga, or erotic prints, also make up a large percentage of the prints as do the landscape scenes of the early 19th century. Other genres include yakusha-e, or kabuki actor portraits and musha-e, or warrior prints the majority of which date from the early 19th century. Here, however, we will focus upon the less well-known and less-researched genre of the yōkai print, which are those prints pertaining to the supernatural. Yōkai is the general term in Japanese that encompasses all supernatural entities, which includes all categories and sub-categories of ghosts and demons alike. In these prints the ghost, demon or specific ghost story is represented as a subject in its own right. Yōkai imagery, however, was not restricted to the woodblock print for yōkai were also represented within other mediums such as Japanese picture scrolls (emaki) and picture books (ehon) and ornamental objects such as netsuke and small sculptures made for Buddhist and Shintō shrines and secular festivals.