After 1972 Munich Olympic Games, the study of interaction between Oriental art and Western art has been activated in Europe especially Germany and France. In order to understand the interrelationship between Western art and Oriental art, which provided a breakthrough to the rational and logical modern Western art, the recent trends in studies in Europe of 19th Century Paintings have to be considered first. In this study, the nature of Orientalism shown in 19th Century French paintings will be reviewed by comparing the Orientalism of early 19th Century and Japonism of late 19th Century.
The Orient as shown in Orientalist paintings reflects the illusion and the curiosity of the Western people. The Orient as shown in the paintings of Delacroix, who was known to have interest in the historical mind from Oriental objects and thus set up his subjective color sense, is the misinterpreted Orient. It was far from the realistic Orient and was mysterified in imagination. The same trend could also be found in other Orientalist’s paintings. The Orient itself had contributed to the beginning of its conquest politically by attracting people’s attention through satisfying the sense of superiority to the Orient and the erotic curiosity.
On the contrary, the Japanese woodblock prints (Ukioe) influenced the Western painting very much in the late 19th Century. The plane and simple format and space composition in Manet’s paintings, the fast and wild brush strokes and very vivid colors in Van Gogh’s paintings, the unconscious snapshot-like poses in Degas’s paintings, decorative patterns and the flat images in Gauguin’s paintings, unfamiliar to the Western people, the comic and distorted faces expressed through simple lines in Lautrec’s paintings, all these were influenced by the woodblock prints of Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige. As a result, the traditional representation of perspective was lost and the plane and simplified painting styles was established, which also affected the artists of 20th Century such as Matisse and Picasso.
In the last chapter, how the influence of Orientalism and Japonism show up in the paintings is compared. It is shown that Orientalism provided the allegory in the paintings(i, e., the visual objects in the paintings) and Japonism effected the Western painting techniques. Western Hegemonism toward the Orient was not expressed at all in Japonism. The social characteristics of 19th Century French painting can be understood in this way.