ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how and why Japonisme has been marginalized within Anglophone histories of Western art. It first shows that Western writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appreciated the complex aesthetic, social, and ideological affinities between ukiyo-e woodblock prints and European modernism. As academic art history developed, however, textbooks of modern art marginalized Japonisme, reducing it to mere stylistic influence in formalist models of modernism and then ignoring it in social historical models, despite deep affinities between metropolitanism in Paris and Edo (present-day Tokyo). Detailed Western studies of Japonisme in the 1970s demonstrated its rich complexity as a mode of cross-cultural interactivity, yet Japonisme has been eclipsed even within cross-cultural studies by the model of Orientalism.
