Brève description / annotation

Is Japonisme also a history of architecture? In this book, the authors lay bare the origins of the taste for Japanese architecture in the West. Born long before what French nineteenth-century art critics called Japonisme, this taste can be detected in a wealth of objects: screens, porcelain, lacquer-work, woodcuts, photographs, as well as in interior decoration and garden pavilions. With more than 500 illustrations in colour, this handsome book presents noteworthy historical and archaeological studies of the bestknown buildings from the heyday of Japonisme: the pavilions at the Paris Universal Exhibitions between 1867 and 1900; the first Japanese house built in France (1886); the Salle de fêtes, a function room on the rue de Babylone in Paris known today as the cinéma La Pagode (1896); the follies in Albert Kahn's Japanese garden at Boulogne- Billancourt (1897); and the Stork Chamber, an exhibition set salvaged by Émile Guimet in 1911. These investigations reveal an interplay in artistic output between Japan and France that is essential to an understanding of those Japanese spaces held in such high regard by Westerners. Leafing through the book, the reader is left in no doubt about the emergence in architecture of a stately expression of Japonisme.

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