Exhibition Fascination Japan at Kunstforum in Vienna

10/10/2018 > 20/01/2019

Monet · Van Gogh · Klimt

The 2018 autumn exhibition in the Kunstforum is devoted to “Japomanie” – the West’s passion for the aesthetics and world of images of the Far East. The exhibition traces its development, starting with the fascination for the exotic and the new and the first stirrings in the 1860s to long after the turn of the century, to its amalgamation into the form vocabulary of Western painting and the influence of its aesthetics on the development of modernism around 1900.

The exhibition includes not only paintings and printed graphics, but also objects and furniture, juxtaposing Japanese woodcuts, screens and artefacts to European works influenced by the aesthetics of the Far East, including by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Gustav Klimt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Nabis and the Blauer Reiter group. Around a hundred exhibits from international public and private collections present a wide-ranging overview of the phenomenon of “Japonisme” that spread throughout Europe from the late nineteenth century to the dawn of the avant-garde movements.

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Picture: Utagawa Hiroshige, The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Highway: Numazu, Scene at dusk, c. 1833/36, colored woodcut, 24.5 x 38 cm © Private Collection, Vienna