ART REVIEWS

ART REVIEWS; In New Jersey, a Permanent Japonisme Display

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: July 8, 1994

New Jersey art museums within easy striking distance of Manhattan offer a number of low-key rewards this summer. The Newark Museum is host to a cluster of offbeat mini-shows, from contemporary American to South Asian art. Jersey City Museum's airy space on the top floor of the city's public library is filled with the vital work of six young sculptors. And the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick has recently inaugurated the first-ever permanent display devoted to the international esthetic movement known as Japonisme. New Brunswick

The Kusakabe-Griffis Japonisme Gallery documents a formative though still little-explored chapter in modern art history, the period from the mid-19th to early-20th century when Japan and the West were first engaged in fertile cultural exchange.

Much of that exchange was socio-economic in origin: Japan, after opening its doors to trade in 1853, was getting its first crack at Western-style industrial progress, while the West was gaining access to an exotic foreign market. Nowhere did this venture have greater immediate impact than on art. On the Japanese side, woodblock prints by artists like Hiroshige quickly began incorporating details of Western culture, from stovepipe hats to locomotives, while advanced European painters, Manet and Van Gogh among them, seized upon the formal properties of Japanese art as a way to break the grip of Western academic tradition.

It should be said right away that none of the work in the Rutgers Japonisme collection is of "masterpiece" caliber. Among its paintings and drawings, prints and posters, books and photographs can be found works by a few high-profile figures (Mary Cassatt and Toulouse-Lautrec are represented by some graphic work; Frank Lloyd Wright by a stained-glass window), but most of the Western artists are notable primarily as textbook exemplars of Japonisme itself.

Yet from this nonstellar, often ephemeral material, the Zimmerli's director, Phillip Dennis Cate, has shaped a telling study in cultural history. One of the installation's very first images gives a taste of the fascinating crossbreeding to come. It is an 1885 Japanese woodblock portrait of Kukuchi Genichiro, editor of the country's first newspaper. The print's technical execution is traditional, as is the pretty landscape of mountains and lakes it depicts. But Genichiro himself is like nothing Japanese art has seen before: he is a rakish figure dressed in a natty checked tweed suit, knee-high boots and a beretlike floppy black hat.

This portrait was intended as a positive emblem of Westernization (the title of the woodblock series from which it comes is "Self-Made Men Worthy of Emulation"), though Japanese depictions of Westerners themselves are sometimes unmistakably derisive. This is certainly true of Utagawa Yoshitoro's print "English Couple" (1861), with its simian-looking bearded merchant dominated by a towering, umbrella-wielding wife in pantaloons.

Western artists display a similar mix of admiration, disdain and incomprehension in their adaptations of Japanese culture. In a famous poster of a black-dressed Jane Avril, Toulouse-Lautrec forges a daring emblem of modernity from the flat planes and solid colors of Japanese prints. By contrast, Philippe Burty, who coined the term "Japonisme" in 1872, turns images of Noh masks into cartoons, and Helen Hyde, one of several American artists who studied in Japan, makes sentimentalized kitsch from what were presumably first-hand observations. Her work is a reminder that while some innovative Westerners used Japanese art to radicalize their vision, others sought the romantic images of pre-industrial serenity that this long-sequestered island nation was imagined to embody.

The Kusakabe-Griffis Japonisme Gallery (named for America's first Japanese college student, who enrolled at Rutgers in 1867, and for his English tutor) provides substantial evidence for all these points of view. It puts the good, the bad and the ugly side by side in a richly textured, stimulating exhibition that anyone interested in the shaping of 19th-century European modernism and in East Asian art will want to see. Newark

Work of the 19th century also plays a significant part in "Gods and Goddesses in Indian Art" at the Newark Museum, a small gathering of South Asian sculptures and paintings from the museum's holdings.

Among the remarkable pieces is a late-19th-century hollow metal head of the god Shiva from southern India. With its large, intense eyes and fantastically decorated, winglike ears, it was created to be carried in religious processions. From the same century, from Rajasthan, comes a large painting on unstretched cotton of women worshipping Krishna. Every element in the composition is symmetrical, yet the brilliantly colored palm groves and peacocks set under a star-filled autumn sky are vibrant with spiritual animation.

Splendid older pieces are also on view: the ninth-century goddess Parvati swaying to the rhythm of unheard dance music is one; a striking four-headed Brahma carved in wood another. But it is the the 19th-century works that prove of particular interest. They represent a period only beginning to get serious scholarly attention and they give clear evidence of ancient traditions perpetuated and transformed in the present.