Faszination Japan

"Japomania" - the enthusiasm of the Western world in the late nineteenth century and the world of images from the Far East: It begins in Paris and spreads from there throughout all of Europe. The high artistic quality of Japanese color woodcuts and other everyday objects is recognized as early as the 1860s. The public's yearning for exotic culture triggers a downright collecting mania for Japanese art. Especially artists begin to collect and integrate the exotic vocabulary of forms into their own pictorial language. Monet, Manet, van Gogh, and Degas are the first, followed by younger artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Marc, Kandinsky, and Bonnard.
The catalog is published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition in the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna and provides a unique overview of the fascination of the exotic from its beginnings to the turn of the century and far beyond.