Monet’s Unified View: The Fusion of Eastern and Western Cultures

When Japan opened its borders in the 1850s, citizens, especially those from France, were awed by the different styles of art the Japanese had compared to the West. As this interest in Japanese culture grew, more and more people collected Japanese prints, books, and other goods. Many artists took inspiration from the Japanese art style, such as the use of bright colors, unusual compositions, and flat, unrealistic perspectives. This eventually led to the creation of a new art movement called Japonisme. One major artist within the movement was Claude Monet, who fell in love with Japan’s style of art and admired nature's role within it. Inspiration from the culture can clearly be seen in his Japanese-styled garden at Giverny but also in the painting La Japoinaise (1876), which allowed him to critique fellow French artists who embraced the Japonisme movement for its exoticism. He instead relied on Japanese forms and color to create his own style of art. While most scholars agree that Monet was trying to criticize Japonisme, they mainly focus on identifying elements of Japanese culture in the painting, without fully addressing why and how Monet utilized these stylistic traits. Rather than focusing solely on aspects of Japanese culture in the painting, my paper positions Monet as a critic of those who denigrated Japanese art by analyzing how he unifies Japanese and French culture in La Japonaise, mainly through examination of the Japanese story depicted on the woman’s kimono. Within this painting, Monet, thus, simultaneously critiques the French appropriation of Japanese culture for its exoticism while melding Japanese literary and artistic traditions with Western ones to showcase to the rest of the art world his specific vision of the unification of the two cultures.