East Side Story

It wasn't long after Japan was forced to open its ports in 1853, following 200 years of being an island unto itself, that its rich artistic traditions infiltrated Western culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American and European artists, on the hunt for novel techniques and alternative approaches that would set them apart, were influenced by Japan's two-dimensional designs, clean lines, geometric patterns, dynamic compositions and coloration, elements that helped define what we now think of as modernism and contributed to movements such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau.

Though Japanese artists traveled to the West and were influenced by their Occidental cousins, "Looking East," a new touring exhibition of 170 mostly Western artworks now at the Asian Art Museum, focuses on the East-to-West transmission rather than cross-pollination. The Japonisme phenomenon enthralled many artists, including Mary Cassatt, Van Gogh and Monet, all of whom were avid collectors of Japanese prints, and its cachet attracted tastemakers and regular folks with a yen for the exotic, who bought cards and other accouterments like the snazzy but not-too-dear desk set from Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Westerners liberally borrowed Japanese motifs and styles, their bright color combinations, unusual points of view, asymmetry, and abstraction, as well as a proclivity for creating works in series format, which captured the mutability of an image or place like Mt. Fuji or Edo at different times of day and transiting through the changing seasons, a practice picked up by Monet. Note his multiple renditions of seascapes and water lilies, i.e., "The Water Lily Pond" (1900) seen here, one of numerous paintings of the artist's Japanese-style garden and its curving footbridge at his home at Giverny.

Artists are like sponges - absorbing, interpreting and responding to a complex multitude of cultural currents and works by each other. It's a process that's often subtle and rarely linear; untangling what moved them and affected their aesthetic choices is a tricky enterprise. Graphic artist Otto Eckmann borrowed not only from Japanese woodblock prints and hanging scroll paintings, but also from medieval German tropes for his design of the iconic vertical Art Nouveau tapestry "Five Swans" (1897), in which a procession of elegant, long-necked swans in an autumnal wood swim down a winding, teal-colored waterway.

Even though Renoir did not share some of his fellow artists' affinity for Japonisme, "The Pinned Hat" (1898), his color lithograph of the daughter and niece of Impressionist Berthe Morisot, is included, primarily because it depicts the intimate domain of women and children, a province not only of ukiyo-e prints, but a subject portrayed throughout the annals of art history.

But you don't have to wholly buy into the show's premise to enjoy the art. To stand in front of "Camille Monet and a child in the artist's garden in Argenteuil" (1875), Monet's tender portrait of an Eden erupting in spring flowers, is to remember the feeling of falling in love. An iridescent Prussian blue glass vase (ca. 1927) by Frederick Carder, a sleek emblem of high modernism, is swoon-worthy. In "Night" (1890) by William Edward Norton, moonlight in reflected on the water as the last remnants of dusk ebb away, and silhouettes of ships, like giant faceless beasts, lurk in the harbor. Japanese prints echoing similar nocturnal themes, like Utagawa Hiroshige's mystical "Pine of Success and Oumayagashi, Asakusa River" (1856), hang nearby.

The exhibition, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has the finest collection of Japanese art outside of that country, and a none-too-shabby inventory of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, pairs examples of Japanese and Western works to advance its thesis, and it can be a bit of a stretch. Though he never visited the country, Vincent Van Gogh was known to carefully copy woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen, and in a quartet of paintings on view he emulates the masters whom he admired with an adherent's devotion. But the connection between Van Gogh's "Postman Joseph Roulin" (1888), a rustic portrait of a humble if weathered civil servant with craggy features, gnarled hands and rumpled blue uniform, and the blunt, fiercely expressive portraits of Kabuki performers in full regalia by Utagawa Toyokuni and Utagawa Kunisada displayed on either side of it, is tenuous at best.

Courtesans were so prevalent in the Japanese art disseminated during this period that some Westerners thought the country was teeming with them. No stranger to the demimonde, Toulouse-Lautrec's frank images of the daily lives of prostitutes in "Woman in Bed, Profile" (1896), a lithograph with bleached reds and the creamy lemon tones of a morning after, may have been inspired by Kitagawa Utamaro's woodblock prints of denizens of the Yoshiwara red light district, daring content by Western standards. Like Utamaro, he moved into a brothel to observe his objects of fascination at close hand.

Less risque but no less beguiling is the cosmopolitan ambience of Bonnard's "The Square at Evening," a delicious conjuring of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the century, and Robert Earle Henri's equally convivial "Sidewalk Cafe" (1899). With their dark, shadowy backgrounds and smartly dressed diners outfitted with startling flashes of firebird red and shimmering white, they have the strong color contrasts, asymmetric compositions and sophisticated urbanity associated with the vivid pictorial qualities of ukiyo-e prints. Wherever Henri, an American, and Bonnard, who was drawn to the Japanese prints he first encountered in 1890, derived their divine inspiration, the understated glamour of these scenes entices viewers to join the party.

Through Feb. 7, 2016