Trade between Japan and Europe in the 19th century on display at Milan's MuDEC

For fall 2019, MUDEC presents the Oriente MUDEC project, which involves all the museum’s exhibition spaces and tells from different points of view-artistic, historical and ethnographic-the mutual exchanges between Japan and Europe through time and the cultural encounter between the two worlds.

The exhibition Impressions of the Orient. Art and Collecting between Europe and Japan, illustrates through a wide and diverse selection of works fromItaly and abroad, the development of the Japan-oriented taste that pervaded Western artistic culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in France and Italy.

On display are more than 170 works including paintings, prints, decorative objects, sculptures and objects of applied art, from major Italian and European museums and private collectors.

The exhibition traces Japan’s profound fascination with Western culture and delves into the dynamics of the complex artistic exchanges that took place between 1860 and 1900.

The art-historical analysis pays special attention to the context of trade relations, entrepreneurial adventures and generally great curiosity that characterized an entire era. Within the varied context of the international taste for Japan and its influence on the arts, the exhibition focuses on the major Italian and European artists who were under the spell of ’Japanism’: from De Nittis to Rodin, Chini to Induno, Van Gogh to Gauguin and Fantin-Latour, Toulouse-Lautrec to Monet, displaying some of the absolute masterpieces of the period.

In particular, the exhibition examines Italian Japonism. In the broader context of the international taste for Japan and its influence on the arts, as a trend concentrated mainly in Paris, the exhibition will focus on the major among the Italian artists who fell under the spell of Japanism, such as Giuseppe De Nittis, Galileo Chini, an artist deeply fascinated by the Orient, Vincenzo Gemito, Federico Zandomeneghi and Giovanni Segantini, an active interpreter of images that made use of these stimuli.

For all information you can visit Mudec’s official website.

Trade between Japan and Europe in the 19th century on display at Milan's MuDEC

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