IN FRENCH PAINTER Edouard Manet’s portrait of the novelist Emile Zola (1868), we see a Japanese block print pinned on a back wall. At that time, Japanese print art was arriving in Paris, and more than a few Impressionists were taken by its novel “flat color” aesthetic.
Later, in 1875, to great controversy, the American painter in England, James McNeill Whistler, unveiled his “Nocturne in Black and Gold” painting, which traditionalists criticized for its dark, ambiguous tones and arrangements.
Arguably, both Manet and Whistler had been influenced, to some degree, by the new arrival, and collection, of Japanese art in France from the 1860s onward. Mostly in the form of block prints on paper or screens (and some ink paintings), Japanese art probably influenced aspects of Impressionism and what also came to be called Tonalist painting (as in Whistler).
The block prints introduced flat shapes and designs of color, often defying traditional linear perspective in landscape or figure imagery. The Japanese aesthetic also carried with it a Buddhist heritage, what has been called “Wabi-Sabi,” a kind of dark, fragmented, and amorphous look that sprang from Buddhist doctrines if impermanence. In one view, this Wabi-Sabi aesthetic influenced the growing trend in Tonalist painting, which also emphasized dark and muted tones with degrees of ambiguity in a landscape, portrait, or still life.
Through the 1860s, the new art term Japonisme arose in the European vocabulary. Japanese wood-block prints and screen designs, according to art historians, probably had an influence on a range of artists, including Vincent Van Gogh (who collected such prints), Toulouse Lautrec, James Tissot, Edgar Degas, William Meritt Chase, and Edmund Charles Tarbell.
Most often these painters adapted objects such as Japanese screens or textiles into a painting, or apparently adopted postures of figures that were common in Japanese art—such as women coming their long hair over the shoulder (see Degas’s bathing scenes, for example).
The dark tones of Wabi-Sabi art from Japan do no trace over to Europe so explicitly as the block print phenomenon, but it was surely there. This use of dark tones in a painting, usually with a few bright elements—suggesting twilight—has often been traced to a new “tonal” musical movement or the rise of black-and-white photography.
How music influenced painting may be hard to describe without the explicit testimony of painters that, “I borrowed my ideas from music.” Tonalist music was abstract, informal, and mood oriented. Indeed, the term Tonalism was first applied to this musical form and later adopted in art. The tie with photography is much clearer: A black and white photo can be developed to be largely shades of black and grey.
Tonalist landscape has also been traced to the early Impressionists who painted in the forests of France, where dim twilight lighting led to dark paintings with a glimmer in a sunset or on the water. This effect also was seen in the much earlier Hudson River School of landscape painters.
Nevertheless, this dark tonal effect was paramount in Japanese art—called Wabi-Sabi—and surely gave European painters new ideas along with the flatness of Japanese block prints. The best known Tonalist painters—Whistler, George Inness, Albert Ryder, and John Twachtman—all were Americans who studied in Europe when Japanese art was exposed to Impressionism.
The Japanese term Wabi-Sabi, even by Japanese interpreters, is hard to pin down, perhaps because the Japanese language often works more by intuition than by conjugating nouns, adjectives, and verbs. In one rendering, the characteristics of the Wabi-Sabi look include darker earthy tones, asymmetrical imperfection, and a rough simplicity or austerity. As to its philosophical roots, it arose from Buddhist notions of impermanence, the flow of nature, and a kind of melancholy (or fact that life is suffering).
Wabi-Sabi, then, in Japanese aesthetic is akin to what classical beauty was to Greek and classical art—a basic aesthetic. It was visual, but more important it was taken to convey a mood—that is, a feeling about the flux of nature, its organic quality and decay, and the fact that all of life is similarly in flux. The word “sabi” may have its roots in the Japanese term for “rust.”
While this may seem morose to Western thought, for Japanese Buddhist culture it conveyed a positive feeling, since the benign notion of “enlightenment,” or detachment from the transient world, was based on recognizing, and feeling, its impermanence, the futility of longing, and the fact of solitude.
This has led to the desire in Japanese art, from ceramic glazing, with uncontrolled flow, to water-driven ink wash painting, to portray a kind of imperfection and change, much as nature is usually amorphous in how its element move and intertwine, grow and perish. In nature, the erosion of stone or wood, or the fading of an autumn leaf, would convey the Wabi-Sabi feeling. The irregularity of a bonsai tree, or a flower arrangement, or the austerity of a stone garden that springs moss, indulge in the same feeling.
For two-dimension art, such as painting, it is probably the dark tones that parallel the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic most. That aesthetic discovery is not limited to Japan, of course, for even Europeans can see it in nature on foggy days or twilight hours. The fact that Japanese art was reaching Europe in the 1860s, and Western painters were taking notice, suggests an influence on the formal rise of what Western art historians now call “Tonalist” painting.
The difference is that in Western art, names and labels and formal explanations are pursued, whereas in much Japanese art, there is no such expectation. It is a sentiment as much as a phenomenon needing precise description.