Bachelor Japanists

Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities

Christopher Reed

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542760
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria LGBT

Challenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s.

Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle's Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed's analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

1. ORIGINATING JAPANISM

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE PARIS

MODERNISM AND JAPONISME

As the ubiquity of the term japonisme suggests, the French got there first. But though their primacy is clear, just where—or what—“there” is is less certain. This chapter approaches that question by way of Jean-Paul Bouillon’s advice that histories of japonisme jump “the tracks of neo-positivist art history—vain quest for a ‘first’ date of penetration, determination of ‘influences,’ reports on ‘sources’ of inspiration” in order to focus on “the signification of the moment.”¹ Michel Melot, too, calls for studies of japonisme to move beyond source hunting and chronology to ask what was “the role and the significance of Japonisme in French society during the second half of the nineteenth century? This question must be posed lest we go on seeing in it just the insignificant whimsy of a group of artists and amateurs provoked by the chance encounter of the two civilizations.”² Taking up these challenges, this chapter on the decades from the 1860s through the 1880s begins by analyzing how chronology debates themselves play a crucial role in modernist ideologies. It then takes up the variety of japonismes at this era by exploring three japoniste houses—all bachelor quarters—created between 1870 and 1885, each in its own way paradigmatic of the ways Japanese aesthetics figured in French culture at this time.

Studies of japonisme dwell on origin claims, which, competitively exaggerated in the first place, are further exaggerated by historians keen to perform the role of scholarly debunker of myths in favor of facts. But myths are key to the meanings of japonisme and, because “the field of art criticism matured in the midst of the Japan craze of the 1870s and 1880s,”³ to modernism in general. Crucial modernist concepts were worked out in relation to Japanese aesthetics, which were central to the development of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting at the heart of the modernist canon. Among these was the idea of influence, which Michael Baxandall calls the “curse of art criticism” for its “wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation.”⁴ This misconception is important because the modernist ideology of art as an active expression of individualism renders passivity anathema.⁵ Modernist critics and historians ritually conjure originality from “influence,” therefore, by fixing on questions of who came first and who followed: the paradigmatic avant-garde artist reifies his invidualism by “borrowing” (the term masks the nature of an appropriation with no expectation of return) something from a social group not accorded the authority of individualism (the Japanese, Africans, children, mental patients, and so on) and passes that “influence” on to other groups denigrated in modernist rhetoric with terms like “follower” or “fashion.” Arguments over who the first japoniste was are, thus, high-stakes debates about who made modernism and who got “influenced” in a system where originality is everything. Differing accounts of which Parisian “discovered” Japanese prints—an artist? a collector? a dealer? a radical? a reactionary? a family man? a bachelor? a woman?—enact conflicting aesthetic and cultural ideologies about modernism and its constituencies.

THE FIRST JAPONISTE(S)

Partisan debates over japonistes’ origin claims have focused on the bachelor brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. And no wonder. When Edmond de Goncourt asserted that he and his brother bought their first album of Japanese prints in 1852, the context offered naysayers an irresistible mixture of notoriety, self-aggrandizement, iconoclasm, and fiction. His 1881 book, La maison d’un artiste (The House of an Artist), asserted the status of the collector/decorator as a creative artist, taking readers on a rapturous, excrutiatingly detailed tour of his home. Pausing on the stairs, Goncourt asserts the brothers’ claim to be the original japonistes:

This album (a reproduction of legendary scenes acted out by dolls in the temple of Kannon) purchased in 1852 was for my brother and me the revelation of this artistic imagery still very vaguely known to Europe, which then gained enthusiasts like the landscape painter Rousseau, and now has such great influence on our painting.⁶

Goncourt’s remark flouts every tenet of the origin narrative modernists had created for japonisme by the early 1880s. Goncourt’s prints are not the Japanese landscapes the Impressionists admired, and he credits Théodore Rousseau, who died in 1867, rather than Whistler or any of the Impressionists, with the “great influence” of Japanese imagery on modern painting. Finally, the date is a blatant fiction. Goncourt introduces his Japanese albums as “books of sunlit images, in which, during the gray days of our sad winter with its rainy, dirty skies, we sent the painter Coriolis searching—or, rather, we searched ourselves—for a bit of the joyous light of the Empire known as the Empire of the Rising Sun.”⁷ The reference here is to the artist protagonist of the brothers’ novel Manette Salomon, written between 1864 and 1866 but set in 1852. Fusing fact and fantasy under the sign of identity—Coriolis personifies the Goncourts’ collective sensibility—Goncourt claims as the date he and his brother first bought Japanese prints the year they were acquired by this fictional character.

This was too much for proponents of French modernism like Raymond Koechlin. The heir to an industrial fortune, Koechlin headed the Louvre’s donors’ council from the 1900s to the 1920s. His own collection of Japanese prints, begun in the 1890s, was part of a project to document art and design significant to French aesthetic accomplishment. Koechlin’s sober-sided history of these prints’ contribution to modern French art and design dismissed Edmond de Goncourt, who “pretended to have purchased the first shipments by chance between 1850 and 1860, but he was doubtless bragging.”⁸ Koechlin set the tone for later critics’ exclusion of the Goncourts from accounts of japonisme because of their “chronic addiction to antedating.”⁹

What such accounts miss is that the Goncourts’ style of alienated self-aggrandizement infused the first assertions of japonisme with associations of the exotic and grotesque. Exaggerating their role in japonisme was like insisting on the aristocratic “de” in their surname (to the point of suing—unsuccessfully—to prevent another family using the name de Goncourt in relation to a different estate of the same name), all the while acknowledging that the title had been recently purchased and they were “not rich and very far from being noble.”¹⁰ From their first publications—theater reviews in newspapers run by a cousin—the Goncourts’ appeal lay in a writing style that sparkled with original neologisms as it offered a stimulating mix of outrageous gossip, outbursts of self-regard, and contempt for contemporary authorities and social norms.

As if all that were not troubling enough to chroniclers invested in ideologies of modernist progress, the Goncourts’ claims to priority as japonistes grounded the taste for Japan in a context so homosocial as to be defiantly anti-heteronormative. Originating, according to Edmond, in their mother’s dying act of linking the brothers’ hands, their remarkable symbiosis was manifest in coauthored novels and a journal written in the first person singular and published as the record of “two lives inseparable in pleasure, in labor, in pain…two minds receiving from contact with people and things impressions so similar, so identical, so homogeneous, that these confessions can be considered the expression of a single me and a single I.”¹¹ Their allies promoted this singular identity. The novelist Émile Zola emphasized the Goncourts’ physical similarities, and Philippe Burty, who coined the term japonisme, published a description of the brothers “only living for one another,” in which he recalled being struck when he first met them by how “everything melded together. First one, then the other, referred to the same work either published or in progress as ‘my book.’ I noticed sentences begun by one taken up in the middle by the other.”¹² Exasperated that other critics failed to recognize their accomplishment in having minimized “that great impedimentum to man, love of women” to “five hours a week, from six to eleven, and not a thought before or after,” the journal insisted, “Love’s égoïsme à deux we have at full power and without cease in our brotherhood.”¹³ When critics mocked the “bizarrerie” of this collaboration, the Goncourts responded indignantly, “It is our marriage, the household of our fraternity they attack. They hate us for our love!”¹⁴

These attitudes worried commentators at the time and since. Much Anglophone scholarship follows historian Roger L. Williams’s furious presentation of the Goncourts in his 1980 The Horror of Life—this title refers to Williams’s warning that Goncourt novels “were flowers of illness meant to sicken us with reality, in the hope that we might come to share the horror of life that could make paralytics of us all.” Complaining that “no biographer has portrayed them as the emotional cripples they were, as sick, pathetic men, in retreat from existence,” Williams traces the mid-twentieth-century’s indulgence of “alienation” and “radical political jargon” to a misplaced reverence for the Goncourts and other “literary giants of nineteenth-century France,” whose faults he exposes in a series of biographical “medical studies” premised on the idea that all these “distinguished French writers” suffered from syphilis. Confident that deviation from monogamy makes a man a “pathetic failure in love,” Williams attributes the shortcomings of the Goncourts’ fiction—“we do not warm up to them as beloved or admired writers”—to the way “they deliberately isolated themselves from the world” through their “bizarre brotherhood.”¹⁵ Such phrases as “retreat from existence” and “isolated…from the world” applied to men so undeniably caught up in the social swirl of nineteenth-century Paris exemplify how readily normativity mistakes itself for universality. Williams presents as self-evident proof of the Goncourts’ pathology their professed disdain for democracy and delight in confounding patriarchal norms through a union in which “we are now like two women who live together, whose health is identical, whose periods come at the same time.”¹⁶ Art historians citing Williams have belittled the backward-looking Goncourt brothers as “resentful and bitter children of the nineteenth century” who “considered themselves born too late to enjoy the effervescent leisure and languorous sensuality that noble elites had enjoyed during the era of the fêtes galantes,” and pathologized their dissent from the consensus of progress as a “convergence of their social critique and their psychological perversion.”¹⁷

Such diagnoses of the Goncourts are useful primarily for revealing the normative boundaries policed around a modernism whose growth is imagined, by contrast, as healthy. From the late nineteenth century onward, modernist rhetoric has celebrated the avant-garde in masculine terms as individualist, competitive, and procreative both aesthetically and sexually, with the corollary that the “evolution” of modern art and the “improvement” of design for objects of daily life involve the elimination of individuals and elements denigrated as feminine or inverted, decorative or domestic.¹⁸ In this system, it is unthinkable that japonisme could have originated in the practices of antique collecting and interior décor performed by a bachelor-brother couple whose self-described “marriage,” most of it enacted as mourning, undercut modernist teleologies of progress along with bourgeois domestic norms and ideas of gender. The painter Paul Cézanne, noting that Edmond lacked a “bourgeoise” (middle-class wife), followed the waspish Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in dismissing Edmond himself as “la veuve” (the widow), a remark that was recorded and publicized by his influential dealer in a demonstration of a core dynamic of avant-garde self-definition, in which old-fashioned femininity is imputed to others as a way of bolstering the speaker’s claims for avant-garde status.¹⁹ Twentieth-century historians reena...