Japanese with A French Accent

By ROBERT HUGHES

The winter's main show at Manhattan's Japan House Gallery, "Paris in Japan," is not popular stuff. Its subject looks almost quaintly peripheral. It sets out to describe the impact of French art on Japanese artists who went to Paris between 1890 and 1930, the highest years of French influence on world culture. It does not contain a single masterpiece; almost everything in it is derivative, and not always very intelligently so. One would not normally cross the street to see earnest Japanese pastiches of Renoir, looking like inflamed rubber dolls. The only artist in it whom anyone in America is likely to have heard of is Fujita Tsuguji, he of the sinuous, minutely penciled studio nudes whose prices seemed so excessive when the Japanese started buying them back at auction 15 years ago. And yet, against all the odds, this is a fascinating show -- one of the most curious spectacles of cultural relativity in recent memory.

The subject is not without its ironies. The Belle Epoque also saw the high- water mark of Japanese influence on French painting and decorative arts. The Western taste for lacquer, fans, screens and wood-block prints that began soon after Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 had become a mania in Paris by the 1890s. Japanism was all the rage. "I envy the Japanese the extreme clearness which everything has in their work . . . They do a figure in a few sure strokes as if it were as simple as buttoning your waistcoat." It is Vincent van Gogh writing from Arles, in his room at the Yellow House, hung with Japanese prints.

Perhaps it was natural that Japanese artists should return the compliment; anyhow it was inevitable, once the traditional isolation of Japan was broken by the Emperor Meiji's decree, in 1868, that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world." As J. Thomas Rimer points out in a fascinating catalog essay to this show, the teaching of Western art in Meiji Tokyo began in 1876 mainly as a "scientific" discipline. But before long the bizarre techniques of the mysterious Occident developed their own momentum for Japanese artists, and particularly the Western way of depicting forms by smearing a kind of sticky, slow-drying mud on cloth, rather than using ink and water on silk as Chinese and Japanese masters had done for millenniums. When the Tokyo School of Fine Arts opened in 1887,its American co-founder, the "Boston bonze" Ernest Fenollosa, insisted that it teach only traditional Japanese techniques. But by 1896 most of its students were petitioning to learn oil painting, and a Western department had to be set up; thereafter, it was the most popular part of the school.

Like the young Japanese designer today who dreams of retracing Issey Miyake's path to New York City, students in Tokyo then yearned for Paris, the capital of modernity. By the turn of the century there was a tenacious Japanese painters' colony in Paris, and the big academic teaching studios that catered to foreign students -- Cormon's, Carolus-Duran's, Collin's -- all had, in addition to their stock of Americans, a number of Japanese students. Many of the students would have preferred to study with the new masters whose work was creating a modernist sensibility, but Van Gogh was dead, and Picasso did not teach.

In learning about the Ecole de Paris, the Japanese visitors were facing severe odds. Nothing in their culture had prepared them for the Western modernist ethos. They came from a world enlaced with traditional forms, in which the idea of an avant-garde was barely conceivable and the notion of radical renewal seemed like cultural parricide. Terms like expression and the self had quite different loadings in Paris and in Tokyo. The rapid change of styles in Paris -- fauvism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism -- was bewildering. But they seemed portents of cultural renewal; so even with Japanese who were painfully aware that their country had a name in Europe for imitation, not invention, the need overran the obstacles. "Of course one has to imitate," remarked one old Paris hand, a Western-style painter named Mitsutani Kunishiro, in 1931. "Even if we want to create works that are uniquely Japanese, we still need to look at Western paintings in order to supplement our own deficiencies."

It was not easy for the artists' families, who had to endure the discomforts of the journey and then, somehow, acclimatize themselves to the utter unfamiliarity of French life. One senses a feeling of doom beneath the stoic words written by Yoneko, the wife of Saeki Yuzo, who spent two sojourns there: "After returning to Japan, my husband, it seems to me, was constantly thinking he could only accomplish the task remaining to him during his life by going back to Paris in order to paint the soiled walls and loosely-fixed posters he found on the back streets." Saeki today is a culture hero in Japan, a Van Gogh-like figure who killed himself in a fit of despair over his art at the age of 30 in 1928 -- a strange freak of reputation for a painter whose work seems not much more than sensitive pastiche of those two archbores of the Ecole de Paris, Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo.

In general the Japanese in Paris were conservative in their taste, preferring as models Renoir and Monet to Picasso. Some of the high points of this show are conservative in the best sense, such as Kishida Ryusei's superrefined Still Life (Three Red Apples, Cup, Can, Spoon), 1920, in which the Japanese passion for wabi -- unfussed, natural simplicity -- finds its way into a still-life scheme inherited from Andre Derain. When Umehara Ryuzaburo went to extremes in 1938 with Nude with Fans, the limbs drawn in thick dissonant red and green lines, his prototype was Matisse's work of 30 years before. Occasionally one picks up some shadows and echoes of cubism -- a broken plane here, a little faceting or transparency there -- but in general the Japanese seem to have avoided it, with one exception: Yorozu Tetsugoro (1885-1927). The self-styled wild man of the Japanese expatriates ("I am a kind of walking aborigine," he proclaimed), Yorozu ran through Van Gogh and fauvism and, after returning to Japan in 1907, arrived at a frenetic mixture -- synthesis is not the right word -- of expressionism and cubism in works like Self Portrait with Red Eyes, 1912.

One may find such experiments naive, but beware. This show has a message in it, like a rock in a snowball. What do the invariably polite Japanese really think of the dozens of American artists in the past few decades who have tried to adopt the forms, or at least the rhetoric, of Zen brush painting? What do Americans' earnest spoutings about calligraphy, meaning any aesthetic scribble, convey to real calligraphers? Provincialism is a two-way street.