1. ORIGINATING JAPANISM
FIN-DE-SIĂCLE PARIS
MODERNISM AND JAPONISME
As the ubiquity of the term japonisme suggests, the French got there first. But though their primacy is clear, just whereâor whatââthereâ is is less certain. This chapter approaches that question by way of Jean-Paul Bouillonâs advice that histories of japonisme jump âthe tracks of neo-positivist art historyâvain quest for a âfirstâ date of penetration, determination of âinfluences,â reports on âsourcesâ of inspirationâ in order to focus on âthe signification of the moment.â1 Michel Melot, too, calls for studies of japonisme to move beyond source hunting and chronology to ask what was âthe 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.â2 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 housesâall bachelor quartersâcreated 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 âthe field of art criticism matured in the midst of the Japan craze of the 1870s and 1880s,â3 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 âcurse of art criticismâ for its âwrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation.â4 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 âinfluence,â therefore, by fixing on questions of who came first and who followed: the paradigmatic avant-garde artist reifies his invidualism by âborrowingâ (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 âinfluenceâ on to other groups denigrated in modernist rhetoric with terms like âfollowerâ or âfashion.â Arguments over who the first japoniste was are, thus, high-stakes debates about who made modernism and who got âinfluencedâ in a system where originality is everything. Differing accounts of which Parisian âdiscoveredâ Japanese printsâan artist? a collector? a dealer? a radical? a reactionary? a family man? a bachelor? a woman?âenact conflicting aesthetic and cultural ideologies about modernism and its constituencies.
THE FIRST JAPONISTE(S)
Partisan debates over japonistesâ 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 dâun 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 brothersâ 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
Goncourtâs remark flouts every tenet of the origin narrative modernists had created for japonisme by the early 1880s. Goncourtâs prints are not the Japanese landscapes the Impressionists admired, and he credits ThĂ©odore Rousseau, who died in 1867, rather than Whistler or any of the Impressionists, with the âgreat influenceâ of Japanese imagery on modern painting. Finally, the date is a blatant fiction. Goncourt introduces his Japanese albums as âbooks of sunlit images, in which, during the gray days of our sad winter with its rainy, dirty skies, we sent the painter Coriolis searchingâor, rather, we searched ourselvesâfor a bit of the joyous light of the Empire known as the Empire of the Rising Sun.â7 The reference here is to the artist protagonist of the brothersâ novel Manette Salomon, written between 1864 and 1866 but set in 1852. Fusing fact and fantasy under the sign of identityâCoriolis personifies the Goncourtsâ collective sensibilityâGoncourt 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 Louvreâs donorsâ 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. Koechlinâs sober-sided history of these printsâ contribution to modern French art and design dismissed Edmond de Goncourt, who âpretended to have purchased the first shipments by chance between 1850 and 1860, but he was doubtless bragging.â8 Koechlin set the tone for later criticsâ exclusion of the Goncourts from accounts of japonisme because of their âchronic addiction to antedating.â9
What such accounts miss is that the Goncourtsâ 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 âdeâ in their surname (to the point of suingâunsuccessfullyâto 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 ânot rich and very far from being noble.â10 From their first publicationsâtheater reviews in newspapers run by a cousinâthe Goncourtsâ 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 Goncourtsâ 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 motherâs dying act of linking the brothersâ hands, their remarkable symbiosis was manifest in coauthored novels and a journal written in the first person singular and published as the record of âtwo lives inseparable in pleasure, in labor, in painâŠtwo 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.â11 Their allies promoted this singular identity. The novelist Ămile Zola emphasized the Goncourtsâ physical similarities, and Philippe Burty, who coined the term japonisme, published a description of the brothers âonly living for one another,â in which he recalled being struck when he first met them by how âeverything melded together. First one, then the other, referred to the same work either published or in progress as âmy book.â I noticed sentences begun by one taken up in the middle by the other.â12 Exasperated that other critics failed to recognize their accomplishment in having minimized âthat great impedimentum to man, love of womenâ to âfive hours a week, from six to eleven, and not a thought before or after,â the journal insisted, âLoveâs Ă©goĂŻsme Ă deux we have at full power and without cease in our brotherhood.â13 When critics mocked the âbizarrerieâ of this collaboration, the Goncourts responded indignantly, âIt is our marriage, the household of our fraternity they attack. They hate us for our love!â14
These attitudes worried commentators at the time and since. Much Anglophone scholarship follows historian Roger L. Williamsâs furious presentation of the Goncourts in his 1980 The Horror of Lifeâthis title refers to Williamsâs warning that Goncourt novels âwere 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.â Complaining that âno biographer has portrayed them as the emotional cripples they were, as sick, pathetic men, in retreat from existence,â Williams traces the mid-twentieth-centuryâs indulgence of âalienationâ and âradical political jargonâ to a misplaced reverence for the Goncourts and other âliterary giants of nineteenth-century France,â whose faults he exposes in a series of biographical âmedical studiesâ premised on the idea that all these âdistinguished French writersâ suffered from syphilis. Confident that deviation from monogamy makes a man a âpathetic failure in love,â Williams attributes the shortcomings of the Goncourtsâ fictionââwe do not warm up to them as beloved or admired writersââto the way âthey deliberately isolated themselves from the worldâ through their âbizarre brotherhood.â15 Such phrases as âretreat from existenceâ and âisolatedâŠfrom the worldâ 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 Goncourtsâ pathology their professed disdain for democracy and delight in confounding patriarchal norms through a union in which âwe are now like two women who live together, whose health is identical, whose periods come at the same time.â16 Art historians citing Williams have belittled the backward-looking Goncourt brothers as âresentful and bitter children of the nineteenth centuryâ who âconsidered themselves born too late to enjoy the effervescent leisure and languorous sensuality that noble elites had enjoyed during the era of the fĂȘtes galantes,â and pathologized their dissent from the consensus of progress as a âconvergence of their social critique and their psychological perversion.â17
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 âevolutionâ of modern art and the âimprovementâ 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 dĂ©cor performed by a bachelor-brother couple whose self-described âmarriage,â most of it enacted as mourning, undercut modernist teleologies of progress along with bourgeois domestic norms and ideas of gender. The painter Paul CĂ©zanne, noting that Edmond lacked a âbourgeoiseâ (middle-class wife), followed the waspish Jules Barbey dâAurevilly in dismissing Edmond himself as âla veuveâ (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 speakerâs claims for avant-garde status.19 Twentieth-century historians reena...