In the second half of the 19th century, Europe was swept by a "mania （狂热）for Japanese aesthetics （美学）"，said Nina Siegal in The New York Times.
Closed to outsiders for centuries, Japan had opened itself up to trade and diplomacy, allowing the rest of the world to discover its unique visual culture. Artists were particularly taken with Japonisme, as it was known, and none more so than Vincent van Gogh （1853—90）. Although he never actually visited Japan, the Dutch artist developed a "fascination" with Japanese woodcut prints, collecting hundreds of examples. Increasingly attracted by Japanese culture, van Gogh studied and copied these prints, and their influence inevitably bled into his work. A new exhibition at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum brings together nearly all of the artist's "major" Japanese-influenced works, as well as about 50 of the prints that played a role in the evolution of his "distinctive style". This show has been five years in the making, said Michael Glover in The Independent, "and it delves into （探索）this subject as never before."
Van Gogh undoubtedly had a "reverence" for Japanese printmakers like Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Two "direct copies" he made of Hiroshige nature scenes hang alongside the originals, demonstrating the intense passion with which he studied the work. He drew on Eastern spiritual philosophy too, depicting himself as "a Japanese priest with shaven head" in a "tragic" late self-portrait. Yet I can't help feeling that the exhibition overstates the importance of Japanese art in van Gogh's work. It suggests that everything from his still life drawings to masterpieces like his "lovely" 1888 painting The Harvest were directly inspired by the likes of Hokusai, yet both clearly owe more of a debt to Dutch painting traditions. Ultimately, the claim that van Gogh's art was transformed by Japanese culture "simply does not hold up".
I disagree, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Seeing van Gogh's work paired with the Japanese prints, it's obvious they were crucial to the development of his style. He learnt compositional tricks from Japanese woodcuts, embracing their use of colour and perspective. More crucial still, they led him to create art with a "devotional relationship to nature" entirely new to European painting. This is an important and appealing show that will lead you to an "inescapable" conclusion: "Japanese art turned van Gogh into van Gogh".
13. What do we know about the exhibition at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum?