‘Japanesque’ sheds light on two worlds

THE STUNNING ARRAY of postimpressionist paintings on display at the Orsay show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum is currently fall’s must-see exhibit. But anyone who can’t get enough of impressionist artists — or has a burning passion to learn more about what made them tick — should head to another San Francisco museum, the Legion of Honor.

That’s where the exhibit “Japanesque: The Japanese Print in the Era of Impressionism,” opening today, aims to shed light on the links between Eastern and Western art in the 19th century.

“The impressionists just said, this is new, this is modern and fresh,” Karin Breuer says as she stands in front of a wall filled with delicate, centuries-old Japanese woodcuts. For more than a year, Breuer, curator-in-charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has combed through museum archives. She pored over extensive holdings of colorful prints and fragile books by some of Japan’s most recognizable master artists — including Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro, who all created ukiyo-e, or images of the floating world (“ukiyo”), a description for people not in the elite class.

The show was conceived by FAMSF director John Buchanan as an illuminating companion to the Orsay exhibition, in the same manner that the recent “Impressionist Paris: City of Light” provided context and background for “Birth of Impressionism,” the first of the Orsay displays.

Named after the British term that describes the influence of Japanese aesthetics on European art, design and fashion, “Japanesque” demonstrates how the country’s art provided tremendous inspiration for impressionist artists and includes a staggering number of prints and bound books — more than 245 in all — many of which have been kept in storage and out of the public eye for more than 20 years.

Rarities abound, including a small volume of hand-colored woodcuts titled “A Father’s Gratitude,” the first example of color printing in Japan. But visitors expecting side-by-side comparisons of Japanese and impressionist prints are in for a surprise.

“I’m making it tough on people,” Breuer says with a laugh as she explains her decision to divide the exhibit between Eastern and Western art.

The curator hopes people will make connections themselves, but has thoughtfully placed a few wall labels here and there to point out common threads.

The only place where viewers will see the works together is at the show’s entrance. James McNeil Whistler’s etching “Old Battersea Bridge,” in which a ship with junk-like sails glides through the water, shows an obvious thematic and stylistic debt to Hiroshige’s “Nihon Bridge in Snow,”a woodcut of a wintry landscape. It is one of a handful of comparisons on display.

Breuer’s tactic works.

The distinct groupings allow viewers to delve into each section, absorbing and familiarizing themselves with the motifs, imagery and subject matter of particular eras. For instance, visitors willing to make the effort to connect the view seen through the diagonal branch of a plum tree in a Hiroshige print to French artist Henri Riviere’s vistas of Paris glimpsed through the architectural fretwork of the Eiffel Tower will find the rewards rich.

They might even begin to think of canvasses such as Vincent Van Gogh’s bright scene of his bedroom in Arles — up at the de Young — in a different light. Van Gogh was known to collect and admire Japanese prints and the influence of their color schemes, linework and unusual viewpoints surfaced in his paintings and drawings.

“Japanesque” is not the first or only exhibit to examine the specific connections between Japanese printmakers and impressionist artists. But Breuer thinks what distinguishes this show from others is the greater picture it paints of the East’s far-reaching influence.

The exhibit extends beyond the French, who turned to more modern methods of printing such as lithography and etching because of the lack of resources for making complicated woodcuts. It includes a number of prints by British and American artists, including Bay Area residents such as Helen Hyde and Pedro J. Lemos, who concentrated on nature scenes and undertook the methods of Japanese printmaking — often teaching themselves — in the early 20th century.

Many artists on display are women such as Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Bertha Lum and Marin resident Katharine Van Dyke Harker, whose “Late Afternoon” depicts Mount Tamalpais bathed in lavender shadow.

To close the show with such a large number of female artists is a welcome gesture. No female printmakers are represented in the Japanese portion of the exhibit because the craft, which involved a designer, a cutter and a printer, belonged to a world closed to women.

Instead, their roles, as depicted in the sumptuous prints, were mainly those of mother, idealized fashion plate or courtesan.