How Japan Colored Van Gogh’s Art
AMSTERDAM — In the soft, clear light of Provence, France, Vincent van Gogh saw the crisp skies of Japanese woodcut prints. The almond blossoms, gnarled trees and irises that dotted the French landscape reminded him of nature scenes painted in Kyoto. And in the locals who drank in cafes of Arles, he saw resonances with the geishas and Kabuki actors of a country he’d never visited.
“My dear brother, you know, I feel I’m in Japan,” van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, on March 16, 1888, not long after he had settled in Arles, by the Rhône River in France.
By June he was urging other Impressionist artists to join him in there. “I’d like you to spend some time here, you’d feel it,” he wrote. “After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel color differently.”
For at least a year, van Gogh lived in Provence in a kind of imaginative projection of an idealized Japan onto the French landscape, said Nienke Bakker, curator of paintings for the Van Gogh Museum. The painter had been bitten by the bug of “Japonisme,” a mania for Japanese aesthetics that swept Europe in the 19th century.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in collaboration with three Japanese museums, has mounted the most comprehensive exhibition to date to explore that inspiration, “Van Gogh & Japan,” which runs through June 24. It shows how, little by little, van Gogh integrated elements of Japanese art into his style.
“It’s hard to imagine what his works would have looked like without this source of inspiration,” said Ms. Bakker, one of the exhibition’s four curators, referring to the influence of Japanese prints.
Van Gogh first encountered Japanese “Ukiyo- e” prints — colorful woodblock prints on handmade paper — in 1885 while he was working in the Belgian port city of Antwerp, whose docks he said were teeming with Japanese wares: They were “fantastic, singular, strange,” he wrote.
When he moved to Paris, he bought about 660 prints for just a few cents a piece. He tacked them to the walls of his studio. At first, van Gogh simply copied Japanese works: For example, in 1887 he traced in pencil and ink the cover of an issue of the magazine Paris Illustré devoted to Japan and also made a large- scale oil painting, “Courtesan (After Eisen),” based on the image.
By the time the artist moved to Arles a year later, he was fully in the thrall to Japan. He sometimes divided the canvas using diagonal lines, rather than using horizontal perspective planes, as was the norm in western painting, and he would streak his paintings with diagonal rain, as he had seen in Japanese prints.
“The first year in Arles, everything is Japan,” Ms. Bakker said. “Later, after his breakdown, that changes, and he still refers to it but it’s less important. The nature of his admiration had changed. It has become integrated into his style but it’s no longer his artistic model.”