The word 'impressionism' for most people conjures up images of rolling French countryside, water-lilies, and scenes of Parisian bourgeois society at the turn of the 19th century. It is the style that is usually regarded as the beginning of modern art in Europe. But the impact of impressionism was not limited to Europe. Leading artists in both Japan and Taiwan were heavily influenced by impressionism. This link between the art of Asia and that of Europe makes the choice of Taipei as the location for an unprecedented display of 60 French impressionist paintings early this year all the more poignant.
The work of the French impressionists came at a time of great social change in Europe. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to a new social class--the so-called bourgeoisie. This nouveau riche class were the owners of the new factories, who resided with their families in big city apartments. They became patrons of the new style of art, and their emphasis on closely knit, private family life became the subject of many impressionist painters. Pierre Auguste Renoir's "Girl playing the piano" is a typical example.
In turn, the work of several impressionist painters, most notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were influenced by these Japanese woodblock prints. Lautrec's thin, fragile, airy ladies working in bars and high-class establishments reduced to a bare outline closely resemble the Japanese ukiyoe. Sometimes he even clothed his models in Japanese-patterned silk dresses. Vincent Van Gogh, during the first experiments marking his turn to impressionism, once meticulously copied a blooming plum tree from a Japanese woodblock print to explore the effects of juxtaposition of contrasting colors, which are typical of ukiyoe prints.
Meanwhil, the effects of Europe's impressionist movement were being felt in Asia. Japan was undergoing a period of radical modernization, which in the cultural field caused a great interest in Western oil painting. Two of the first Japanese teachers of Western oil painting, which became part of the official curriculum in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1896, were Kuroda Seiki (黑田 清輝) and Kume Seiichi ( 久 米 清一), who both came back from Paris in 1893. They introduced impressionism and the free lifestyle of the French art scene to Japan. In 1907, the first show of original impressionist paintings was held in Japan, including works by Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and others. This was the year after Cezanne's death, and a number of painters, including Renoir, were still quite active at the time. Ninety years later, it is almost the same group of artists whose works are on show at the National Museum of History in Taipei between January 15 and April 27, 1997.
The introduction of impressionism and Western painting styles to Taiwan encouraged pilgrimages of Taiwanese artists to foreign countries for artistic inspiration. In the first batches in the 1930s and 1940s most traveled to Japan, but others ventured to Paris, New York, Spain, and Germany. Leading Taiwan artist Yang San-lang (楊三郎), whose impressionistic scenes of rural Taiwan now command some of the highest prices of such art, was among the first to go to Paris.
One of the mainstreams in this new art market is Taiwanese-made late impressionism, with a strong emphasis on untouched countryside and idyllic farm life; but at the same the concern with purely urban matters has become the theme of other artists like Lu Hsien-ming (陸先銘), who express themselves in the language of international avant-garde contemporary art, pinpointing ironically the phenomena of modern urbanization, prostitution, pollution, and corruption.
In the commercial art world, however, the impressionistic, idyllic rural scenes of the so-called "old Taiwanese painters," including Yang San-lang and others, dominate the auction houses. Their "Taiwanese-style impressionism" is still the big seller. This alone demonstrates the importance of French impressionism to Taiwan.
Copyright 1995 Vision International Publishing Co.