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Japanese wrapping paper wowed Europe
Prints in the packing
The prints counted as low culture, much like manga does, and they were disposable, printed in huge numbers. Packing delicate ceramics in them was like putting newspapers around fragile objects, until the Europeans taking off the wrapping noticed how beautiful it was.
Japonisme in Paris
At a World's Fair in Paris, Japan set up a booth showing its visual arts, and the Europeans were smitten. Van Gogh, Degas, and Monet all took influence from the prints. The French in particular were drawn to them, and the movement became known as Japonisme. It stayed a pursuit of the upper classes and the aesthetes.
The beatnik wave
A second wave arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, when beatniks and hippies took up loose concepts of Buddhism from Japan: letting things happen, not always being the agent of your own story, and accepting the universe as it is. Those ideas came through Japanese imagery, novels, and poetry, and again they belonged to high art, or at least what Westerners imagined was high art.
The current wave is the first one driven by pop culture.
How did Japanese art reach Paris fairs?
Japan had limited foreign contact for over two centuries until Commodore Perry's ships arrived in 1853 and treaties followed later that decade. Japan then took part in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, its first appearance at a world's fair. It sent ceramics, lacquerware, and prints that European collectors and dealers quickly noticed. The dealer Siegfried Bing, who ran a Paris gallery of Japanese art, published the journal Le Japon artistique from 1888.
What did Van Gogh take from the prints?
Van Gogh collected hundreds of Japanese woodblock prints while living in Paris in the 1880s. In 1887 he painted oil copies of two prints by Hiroshige, including a rainy bridge scene. The flat areas of color, bold outlines, and cropped compositions in his later work echo those prints. He also placed Japanese prints on the wall behind the dealer in his 1887 Portrait of Pere Tanguy.
Why did Zen reach 1950s Americans?
After World War II, the scholar D. T. Suzuki lectured on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University and published English-language books on the subject. The Beat writers also read Japanese haiku in translation. Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums put Buddhist ideas in front of a wide readership. Poet Gary Snyder, the model for one of its main characters, spent years studying Zen in Kyoto.
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