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Japonisme and gender in the works of Alfred Stevens and William Merritt Chase
Meldrum, Alexis Taylor,author.
Meldrum, Alexis Taylor,author.
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2019
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Abstract
Japonisme, a term coined by French critic Phillippe Burty in 1878, describes the Western fascination with Japanese art and culture manifested in the visual and decorative arts, architecture, music, literature, fashion, and graphic design. This thesis examines paintings of women by European artist Alfred Stevens and his friend American painter William Merritt Chase to determine what their representations of japonisme reveal about transatlantic conceptions of female gender and sexuality. I offer a comparative analysis of cultural and artistic norms in Europe and the United States by exploring ephemeral and malleable notions of ideal femininity, whose associations with japonisme include nature, fantasy, and objecthood. In a period characterized by the rise of imperialism, the increased systematic study of ethnography and physiognomy, and the frequency of World’s Fairs, Stevens and Chase maintained eclectic studio collections and rendered them in their paintings. Their pictures-within-pictures in the background of these studio scenes are a tool to assert their artistic alignments, for example, Chase’s inclusion of Stevens’s 1880 La Bête à Bon Dieu in the background of his 1892 In the Studio, Mrs. Chase. In Chase’s borrowing of Stevens’s Parisienne ideal, white, middle-class type, Chase transcribes his own realist tendencies in his images of Japanese-clad Western women. William Merritt Chase takes Alfred Stevens’s essentialized feminine forms clothed in associations of japonisme and transfers them to his uniquely American context, while retaining many of his constructions of femininity.
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1 online resource (viii, 107 pages) :
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Art