Japanese American Imperialism

Food is a central part of French culture, however it is not the only artistic component of its culture. During the 1860’s, Japanese artistic influence began to flow into France due to the reopening of trade relations between Europe and Japan. Japanese art, especially ukiyo-e print, had a special appeal to some French impressionistic artists of the time such as Edgar Degas and Henri Toulouse- Lautrec. In this time period imperialism in Europe had sparked an interest in other cultures of the world. With the opening of Japanese trade, its culture was revealed to Europeans as being not only unusual and strange, but refined and elegant. The French printmaker, Felix Bracquemond, was one of the earliest enthusiasts and he found Hokusai’s Manga in
In France, artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their friends from the School of Paris blended the treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting characteristics of this art style, such as pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. Although these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they came across and observed in detail, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the sculptures and adapted these qualities to their own efforts, applying their own touch of the brush, to move beyond the form of Western art defined by naturalism since the Renaissance. Henri Matisse’s first demonstrations of influence from African art were revealed after a trip he took to North Africa, in the spring of 1906, as he painted two versions of The Young Sailor. Around the same time, Picasso completed his portrait of Gertrude Stein, the American expatriate writer, finalizing her face after many re-paintings in the frozen, masklike style of archaic sculptural busts from native country,