Spread of Universality and Unity of Beauty—J. McN. Whistler’s Japonisme as staring point

Abstract

Encountering different cultures, 19th century artists in Japan and the West took another look at their tradition and searched for new forms of expression. J. McN. Whistler was one of the earliest painters who showed an interest in Japanese art. He preached universality and promoted the harmonization of the beauty of eastern and western art, both of which find their origin in ancient Greece. In this paper, I start my discussion with Whistler, examine the spread of his idea through the networks of Charles Lang Freer, Ernest Fenollosa and Kentaro Kaneko, and explore how each figure played an historical role as painter, patron, foreign governmental employee, and bureaucrat in the context of globalization in the late nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century, and pointed out that they found origins of eastern and western art in ancient Greece, standard of the tradition of Western Art for affirmation of the idea ‘universality and harmonization of beauty’.