The Influence of Ukiyo-e on Western Art

As one of the first Japanese artforms to find its way across the sea to Europe and America, the traditional Japanese woodblock printing of ukiyo-e has had a significant and profound impact on Western art that has influenced many artists and movements from Impressionism to Art Nouveau – and even paved the way for Modernism.

The West was made to wait for the arrival of Japanese art of ukiyo-e. A period of isolationism in the mid-17th century in Japan meant the country was largely shut off from the world, before re-opening to other nations in the mid-19th century. The wait was worth it, as European artists were captivated by this Japanese devotion to aesthetics. It was new, it was exciting, and it would change how paintings are viewed and interpreted.

Often translated as ‘pictures of the floating world,’ Japanese ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints originally depicted red light and theatre districts of cities during the Edo Period, as well as scenes of beauty, poetry, nature, spirituality, and love. The prostitutes and Kabuki actors (from traditional Japanese theatre) depicted became style icons, and their style reached people via the inexpensive ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It was art for the masses. The influence this exposure had upon the West became known as Japonism, and its footprint can be seen in the works of modern masters from Edgar Degas to Vincent van Gogh.

Separated by an ocean and thousands of miles, ukiyo-e deeply resonated with French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as they shared a desire to depict the world around them – from romantic to mundane, natural, and explicit scenes. Expressed in bold color and distinctive compositions, these highly original and radical pieces of art tempted French artists to break away from traditional approaches to painting. Flattened perspectives, empty space in the middle of a painting, and tight cropping all contributed to this transformative new art that showed a radically different approach to art.

Take a look at Katsushika Hokusai’s series of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji from the early 1800s, and in particular the now-iconic Great Wave, which left an indelible imprint on a group of artists living and working in Paris at the end of the 19th century and still endures as a popular print worldwide. Such was its influence that Claude Monet had a print of The Great Wave displayed at his home in Giverny, while Paul Gauguin, Degas, Gustav Klimt, Édouard Manet, and van Gogh all collected Hokusai’s prints. And his curvilinear forms and wave-like compositions would even influence the development of Art Nouveau. But first, Impressionism.

Impressionable Impact

The arrival of Ukiyo-e on Western shores was not only an exciting artistic development, but it would also have a transformative impact on how art is visualized. Paving the way for modern art, several prominent Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters incorporated Ukiyo-e’s stylistic elements into their work and collected these exciting new Japanese prints.

Eager to break with tradition in his depictions of daily life in Paris, Édouard Manet was one of the first major painters to embrace ukiyo-e. Displaying his desire for artistic rebellion, he began to abandon perspective and instead use flat colors in his depictions of daily life.

It was Vincent van Gogh that was perhaps the most enchanted by the arrival of this new Japanese art, which is evident in the hundreds of ukiyo-e woodblocks that he collected and are now held in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. His Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) includes a prominent Japanese print in the background, but his passion is clearly evident in Bridge in the Rain, a copy of Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857), which showed his developing fondness for experimenting with depth, perspective, and block colors. 

He was a great admirer of both Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, and he incorporated the strong outlines, bold colors, and new perspectives typical of their art into his paintings. The cropped compositions and large color fields can be seen in van Gogh’s Flowering Plum Orchard, which was greatly influenced by Plum Park in Kameido by Hiroshige. Similarly, The Courtesan is based on a woodcut by the Japanese artist Keisai Eisen and makes use of bright colors and bold outlines to imitate the effects of woodcut. Van Gogh framed his courtesan with a pond full of water lilies, bamboo stems, cranes and frogs, which had a hidden meaning, as grue (crane) and grenouille (frog) were French slang words for prostitute.

Similarly influenced by the asymmetry and tight cropping of ukiyo-e, Edgar Degas’ use of this approach is particularly obvious in his ballet and bathing scenes. Adopting Japanese-inspired perspectives, his use of empty space and flattened depth mirrors the techniques found in ukiyo-e, while his depiction of figures at unusual angles and obscured views also share an association. This newfound devotion to block color is evident in Combing the Hair (La Coiffure) (1896), while The Rehearsal (1874) showcases the Japanese influence of tight cropping and prominent empty space.

Nouveau Ukiyo-e

Inspired by Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec also produced paintings depicting modern subjects, like music halls, bars, and absinthe-soaked brothels. His favored subject mirrored Edo’s pleasure districts and he was a great admirer of this new style. He collected ukiyo-e prints by Kitagawa Utamaro, who was arrested for his prints of courtesans at parties in 1804, making them kindred spirits, separated only by culture and the Pacific Ocean. Look at Toulouse-Lautrec’s Divan Japonais alongside Utamaro’s Three Beauties of the Present Day (1793) and there are clear parallels in the use of colour and dark contouring.

Toulouse-Lautrec was equally influenced by the boldly profiled and highly distinctive portrait of Kabuki Actor Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei in the Play The Colored Reins of a Loving Wife (1794) by Tōshūsai Sharaku. The influence of the portrait’s three-quarter view, simplified approach, and strong lines can be seen in his depictions of the occupants of the Moulin Rouge.

The emphasis on flowing lines, organic forms, and decorative elements in the works of artists like Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha can be traced back to Japanese aesthetics. And, the simplified forms and abstraction seen in early 20th-century art owe much to the stylized approach of ukiyo-e.

The influence of ukiyo-e prints is evident in Klimt’s golden phase and his Portrait Of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). The flat planes, intricate patterns and vivid colors are mirrored by ukiyo-e artists, and the fact that he was said to have been a great admirer of the Rinpa School of Kyoto should come as no surprise.

Radical Heritage

By the 1880s and the closing decades of the Meiji period, traditional ukiyo-e was in rapid decline, as the same trade routes that had once made it so popular a century earlier saw to its demise. The influx of European ideas, technology, and art radically transformed Japanese culture, but while its embers faded in Japan, its influence continues today thanks to the radically bright colors, flattened perspectives, empty space, and tightly cropped figures that make ukiyo-e such a transformative art form.

Ukiyo-e allowed these radical European artists to step away from the detailed reality of historical paintings and instead focus composition, color, and line. It was new, it was exciting, and it hadn’t been seen in the West before.

As Toulouse-Lautrec once said, “I have tried to do what is true and not ideal,” as he and his contemporaries painted their vision of reality and abandoned the rigid structure of traditional painting that re-shaped the trajectory of modern Western aesthetics, eventually paved the way for color field painters like Mark Rothko, bridged cultures, and inspired generations of artists.