Nelson-Denny Practice Test 12

Prints from the Far Side of the World

¹In the 1850s, Japan ended more than two centuries of strict limits on foreign trade, and Japanese goods soon reached Europe in growing numbers. Among them were color woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world." In Japan the prints were cheap, everyday items. In Paris, a circle of young painters treated them as revelations.

²What struck these artists was how differently the prints organized a picture. Since the Renaissance, European painters had generally tried to make a canvas look like a window onto deep space. Japanese printmakers often did not. They viewed scenes from high above or at steep angles, cut figures off abruptly at the edge of the frame, and filled large areas with flat, unshaded color bounded by strong outlines.

³To painters already restless under the rules of the official academies, these devices suggested a way out. Edgar Degas began composing pictures of dancers and racehorses as if glimpsed by accident, with figures cropped at the margins. Claude Monet collected hundreds of Japanese prints and later built a footbridge in his garden that recalled bridges he had seen in them. Vincent van Gogh went further, copying prints by Hiroshige in oil paint.

⁴Critics soon had a name for the fashion: japonisme. Yet the term can mislead if it suggests simple imitation. The French painters rarely tried to make their canvases look Japanese. Instead, they borrowed particular solutions to problems they were already trying to solve, such as how to capture a fleeting moment or how to make a painting announce itself as a flat, decorated surface rather than a window onto reality. The prints gave them permission as much as instruction.

⁵The exchange also complicates a familiar story about modern art. Impressionism is often described as a purely European invention, yet some of its most recognizable features owe a debt to an art form that its own culture regarded as ordinary.