When Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry opened Japan to the United States in 1854 — Japan had shunned contact since 1633 — he revolutionized not only Japan, but world art, as well.
European tourists followed the commodore’s inroads and brought back Japanese souvenirs that included the now world-famous “ukiyo-e” woodblock prints. Western art was never the same, a development made abundantly clear in the thoughtful, though uneven, “East Meets West: Hiroshige at the Phillips Collection.”
Modern art in the West was profoundly influenced by the flattened patterns and exaggerated asymmetries of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), one of Japan’s great woodblock-print artists.
Juxtaposing superb examples from the artist’s acclaimed “The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido” series alongside European and American paintings from its permanent collection, the Phillips illustrates Hiroshige’s cross-cultural impact. The “Tokaido” series is a sparkling chronicle of Japan’s main, 300-plus-mile thoroughfare from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto.
Unfortunately, the modern European and American works on display here do not represent the best of the museum’s permanent collection, temporarily thinned as a result of sending “From El Greco to Picasso: European Masterworks From the Phillips Collection” to Tokyo’s Mori Arts Center for the summer. (The Hiroshiges are on loan to the Phillips for the summer from a private collection in Japan.)
Even so, the Phillips exhibit is entertaining, offering the challenge of searching out Hiroshige’s simplified structuring, empty space, singing line and bird’s-eye point of view in work by, among others, the great French impressionists Claude Monet and Pierre Bonnard.
The exhibit’s opening works, Hiroshige’s “No. 22 Okabe — Utsu Mountain” (from the series) and Bonnard’s “Narrow Street in Paris,” show Hiroshige’s downward slicing of a tumultuous mountain and the French artist’s painting of a street from high above. Before such adventures in perspective by Japanese ukiyo-e artists, Western artists rarely painted from great heights.
Exhibit curator Susan Frank says she attempted to create “visual conversations” in such juxtapositions as Hiroshige’s famed “No. 16 Kambara — Night Snow” with John Henry Twachtman’s “Winter” and Augustus Vincent Tack’s “Windswept” in the second gallery. “Kambara” once belonged to Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection (then Phillips Memorial Gallery), who prized its typically Japanese economy of means, which he saw also in the Tack and the Twachtman. The snow’s glow creates the atmospheric richness Mr. Phillips also admired in the work of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e artists.
Miss Frank’s “conversations” continue in gallery four, where the dramatic, flattened sweep of the cove’s black outline in Albert Pinkham Ryder’s haunting “Moonlit Cove” echoes the dynamic patterning of Hiroshige’s neighboring “No. 26 Nissaka — Sayo Mountain Pass.” Another effective dialogue occurs between John D. Graham’s flatly curved “Blue Bay” and Hiroshige’s similarly rounded “No. 10 Odawara — Sakawa River.”
Some of the best comparisons appear in the exhibit’s last gallery, with Japanese-American Kenzo Okada’s enormous, voidlike “Footsteps” and Hiroshige’s “No. 14 Hara — Mount Fuji in the Morning.” Mr. Okada’s expanse of white brush-scumbled canvas clearly indicates his Asian heritage.
Visitors must not miss gallery three’s focus Hiroshige display, which opens with the Tokaido series’ first print, “No. 1 Nihombashi — Morning View,” and its last, “No. 55 Keishi — Kyoto, Great Sanjo Bridge.” Both feature one of Hiroshige’s most powerful visual tools, that of the bridge. Nihombashi marked Edo’s center and the starting point of the Tokaido. “No. 55” shows lovely ladies parading over a gracefully printed bridge in Kyoto.
With “East Meets West,” the Phillips has made a sincere effort to illustrate how Western artists absorbed and then assimilated Eastern — especially ukiyo-e print — conventions. The Hiroshiges are wonderful, and it was a major coup to bring them here. The museum, however, should have retained for display a better selection of works from its own collection.
WHAT: “East Meets West: Hiroshige at the Phillips Collection”
WHERE: Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, closed Mondays. Through Sept. 4.
TICKETS: $8 adults, $6 visitors 62 and older and students, free for Phillips Collection members and visitors under 18. For tickets, visit www.ticketmaster.com or call 1-800/551-SEAT.
PHONE: 202/387-215
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