Van Gogh, the Japanese

Hidden on a side street, near Fauchon at La Madeleine, La Pinacotheque de Paris offers didactic and thought provoking exhibitions. The latest is dedicated to Van Gogh and the influence of Japanese prints on his works, in particular the prints from Hiroshige, the Master of Edo (Tokyo).

By the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had opened its borders to foreigners and collecting Japanese prints became fashionable. Samuel Bing offers Japanese art in his gallery, and Theo, Van Gogh's brother, collects more than four hundred prints now housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

With forty paintings from Van Gogh, the curator makes the point. Next to each painting, copies or details of the print which matches the work reveal Van Gogh's source of inspiration. Structure, composition, movement, colors, even the subject acquire a Japanese flavor. Excerpts from Van Gogh's letters to Theo, displayed on the walls are a testimony to his interest for the Japanese culture, art and its religion. He is spending 1888 in the South of France where he has "discovered Japan". 

Art allows a symbiosis between the quiet, serene world of the Japanese artist and the hallucinatory, schizophrenic world of Van Gogh.     

Van Gogh communicates an inner energy with his fluid but precise stroke. The thick paint on the canvas has an earthy feel illuminated by an ethereal light, a celebration of life at the time when the artist is sinking deeper in a state of dementia.

no photographs allowed
Wiki media

"The Blooming Plum tree", 1887, Van Gogh next to "Plum trees in Kameido", Hiroshige

"The Olive Trees" 1889, Van Gogh

German Expressionists in Paris

Expressionism opposed to Impressionism? Painting visual appearances or the emotions they provoke? The question gets deeper with the exhibition at the Pinacotheque in Paris "Expresssionismus & Expressionismi, Berlin-Munich 1905-1920 Der Blaue Reiter vs Brucke" which opposes the two German Expressionist movements.


The paintings, one hundred and seventy in all, illustrate the difference between the two movements. Grouped by subjects (portraits, landscapes, travels, nudes...) with paintings from artists seldom shown like Gabriel Munter, Gontcharova, Von Jawlensky, Marc, Macke, Verefkin, Larionov, Pechstein and more.
Small dots next to the paintings, blue or red, identify which group the painter belonged too, Northerners from Dresden or Blue Reiders from Munich.

As I progress through this very didactic exhibition, I recognize the artists: Nolde with his heavy pasty, aggressive colors with the subject in the foreground taking over the canvas, Kirchner with his yellowish skin tones filling sharp black drawings, Werefkin with her poetic and dreamy paintings. Kandinsky is well represented with paintings assembled from far away places like "Arabes III" 1911, already abstract with the hazy figures melting in the background, on loan from the National Gallery of Armenia or "Improvisation 34" 1913, aquatic composition from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Kazan, Tatarstan Republic (I had to look on a map to find Kazan). A productive artistic time in Germany is unfolding room after room in front of the visitor who can visualize the difference between the two movements: aggressive, primitive, fauvist, rebellious with Die Brucke, opposed to Der Blaue Reiter more intellectual, spiritual, with softer colors and lines, more thoughtful, appeased and also rebellious .
The exhibition has reached its goal and I am leaving with an understanding of these two German movements which lost too many of their members during WWI and then were banned by Hitler.

photographs were not allowed

public domain from top to bottom:

"Three Bathers" Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1913

"Sturmwind" Marianne Von Werefkin, 1915-17

"Schokko with Red Hat" Alexej von Jawlensky, 1909

"Der Traum" Franz Marc