Cosmo Out-meeting on January 27th 2016

After a lovely lunch in the Café of the Bonner Kunstmuseum 11 of us gathered in the foyer of the Bundeskunsthalle for our tour of the current exhibition of Impressionist paintings in Japanese collections , the title being  “Japan’s love affair with Impressionism from Monet to Renoir “.

Our tour guide  had some initial problems with sorting out the right number of audio guides for the group and inevitably -one of life’s constant mysteries-  at least one didn’t work straight off. Once that was all sorted however the guide was superb.  He had great enthusiasm for his subject, his English was very good and he had structured his talk in such a way  that we were always in the right room and facing the right paintings for what he was telling us.

We found out that Impressionism was just developing in France at the same time as Japan was reopening to the world after her 300-year self-imposed isolation. This opening led to great industrial development which in its turn created a lot of wealth among Japanese industrialists.  Fortunately, many of them were happy to spend their new money on European i.e. French art of the day and ship it to Japan.  The style and techniques the Impressionists chose –painting everyday scenes of ordinary people and catching fleeting moments in life- dovetailed with the Japanese art tradition of wood-cuts with everyday scenes and their love and respect for the ephemeral and transient. In this context he mentioned the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival as an example of celebrating the ephemeral. The Impressionist collections which arrived in Japan led to Japanese artists working in this style as well so many of the paintings we saw and would have thought of being by Monet, for example, were actually done by Japanese painters.

In spite of wars and damage since the 1850s  Japan today has many museums and art galleries with large collections of European Impressionist paintings and our guide pointed out that it would be possible to study this art there without ever being in Europe.

Our tour lasted for an hour and was fascinating from start to finish.  The exhibition is still open till ???  and is well worth a visit.