基本説明
Is Japonisme also a history of
architecture? In this book, the
authors lay bare the origins of the
taste for Japanese architecture in the
West. Born long before what French
nineteenth-century art critics called
Japonisme, this taste can be detected
in a wealth of objects: screens,
porcelain, lacquer-work, woodcuts,
photographs, as well as in interior
decoration and garden pavilions.
With more than 500 illustrations
in colour, this handsome book
presents noteworthy historical and
archaeological studies of the bestknown
buildings from the heyday of
Japonisme: the pavilions at the Paris
Universal Exhibitions between 1867
and 1900; the first Japanese house built
in France (1886); the Salle de fêtes, a
function room on the rue de Babylone
in Paris known today as the cinéma
La Pagode (1896); the follies in Albert
Kahn's Japanese garden at Boulogne-
Billancourt (1897); and the Stork
Chamber, an exhibition set salvaged
by Émile Guimet in 1911.
These investigations reveal an
interplay in artistic output between
Japan and France that is essential to
an understanding of those Japanese
spaces held in such high regard by
Westerners. Leafing through the book,
the reader is left in no doubt about the
emergence in architecture of a stately
expression of Japonisme.
