Japonisme and Architecture in France, 1550-1930

Résumé En

Is Japonisme also a history of architecture? In this book, the authors lay bare the origins of thetaste for Japanese architecture in the West. Born long before what French nineteenth-centuryart 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 andarchaeological studies of the best-known buildings from the heyday of Japonisme: the pavilions atthe Paris Universal Exhibitions between 1867 and 1900; the first Japanese living space fitted outin France (1886); the Salle de fêtes, a function room on the rue de Babylone in Paris known todayas La Pagode cinema (1896); the follies in Albert Kahn’s Japanese garden at Boulogne-Billancourt(1897) (cover image); and the Stork Chamber, an exhibition set salvaged by Émile Guimet in1911. These investigations reveal an interplay in artistic output between Japan and France that isessential 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 of a stately expressionof Japonisme – in architecture.