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Asian Art in the Netherlands
In the first of three articles looking at art in Amsterdam, we take a look at how the Netherlands presents Asian art...
February 23, 2023
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
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The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
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Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
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In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
.JPG)
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
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Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
Contacts - and colonial histories – have connected Asian countries and the Netherlands for many centuries. For over 200 years, the Netherlands was the only Western country permitted to trade with the Japanese, via the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s post of Dejima in Nagasaki, until their exile in 1843.
Orientalism, and 19th century European Japonisme in particular, was strongly informed by these exchanges, whilst Japanese artists and academics (rangaku) appropriated Western art influences for domestic and export purposes.
Whilst Japanese objets d’art, produced for the domestic market, were first exhibited in Paris, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that the Dutch started to appreciate Asian objects as important art forms. Even before the foundation of the Royal Asian Art Society (KWAK) in 1918, individual artists and collectors were amassing objects of their own, which form the basis of many national collections today.
The Rijksmuseum’s Asian Pavilion includes a selection of 20th Century Japanese prints, albums, and illustrated books. Only a few of the 1100-strong Elise Wessels Collection is now on show, following a gift from the Foundation in October 2022. But what we do see embodies these complex, two-way flows.
Maekawa Senpan’s ‘Farm Woman from Tokoku’ (1956), a rural subject depicted in the 20th century ‘creative printmaking’ (sosaku-hanga) style, fuses both Japanese tradition and modern design processes. Watanabe Shozaburo’s traditional kabuki theatre portraits straddle his vision of Morito Kanya XIII as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the French play first performed in Japan in 1920.
Those featured in the Collections are old favourites for those with an interest in woodblock, like Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Tipsy’ moga (1930-1931). Many more are explained for new enthusiasts in the Rijksmuseum’s permanent displays nearby. Of New Printmaking (shin-hanga), creative print’s counterpart, we read how ‘crisply detailed prints…sometimes make you forget that what you are looking at is a woodcut and not a watercolour.’ It recalls the way anime films blur the boundaries between watercolour and animation.
Elsewhere, we see works recontextualised to challenge stereotypes, like Chinese ceramics showing courtly women playing football (cuju), and stereotypes of Western women as ‘Long Elizas’. Upstairs, captions acknowledge the influence of Asian models on European ceramics production. Take Ernest Chaplet, whose experimental firing methods and vivid oxblood red vases are inspired by Kangxi-era Chinese porcelains. (Another floor, and we see Maurits Cornelis Escher’s prints aping Japanese design, in more than just their signature.)
Most thrilling are those contemporary art responses to these multilinear flows. Aiko Tezuka uses textiles to highlight the trade-oriented interactions between the Netherlands and Japan, respinning Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ - on show upstairs – with Indian-imported chintz.
Western tablecloths (and manners) were introduced in Japan from the 19th century, and similarly appropriated and adapted by local tastemakers. Here, Tezuka takes 16th century European tablecloths, and tacks on symbols of environmental destruction, entwining historic patterns of consumption with our contemporary political reality.
Unravelling this long thread of history leads us to the nearby Stedelijk Museum. Here, we also see the influence of Japanese prints in the paintings of George Hendrik Breitner and Vincent van Gogh. But the museum pays more attention to Indonesia (Java) and Suriname, two Dutch colonies which established their independence in 1945 and 1975 respectively.
Its collection, split into pre- and post-1950, is curated by theme more than chronology, setting contexts which allows the viewer to make more experimental, interpretative connections over time. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs President Sukarno, the first post-independence president of Indonesia, whilst linocuts pay tribute to the work of resistance leader Anton de Kom.
Upstairs, we see how Nola Hatterman moved to Java and set up art schools to challenge Western models in the long years before independence. The reverse is also true; educated, in part, in nearby Rotterdam, expressive painter Soeki Irodikomo draws on traditional Javanese arts like batik and wayang puppet theatre. (Even more contemporary examples of both can be found at the Tropenmuseum’s superb exhibitions, Our Colonial Inheritance and Things That Matter.)
In earlier rooms, we see how wayang puppetry also influenced the work of 19th century artist Jan Toorop. ‘The basis of my work is Eastern,’ wrote Toorop, ‘the Indies are what first introduced me to beauty.’ Toorop is typically claimed as a Dutch Symbolist, thus entirely located within the European art tradition. But the painter and poster artist was born in Java, to mixed parentage. His multicultural heritage is used here to discredit his distinct ownership by – or even ability to classify - Dutch or European art. ‘This makes it seem as if colonial links appeared spontaneously in the Netherlands,’ one caption details, ‘Yet inspiration does not traverse the world on its own; it travels with makers and objects.’
The Stedelijk doesn’t shy from taking responsibility, highlighting its own histories of ethnographic museums, exhibitions, and the appropriation of Indonesian batik in Dutch design. Alongside individual institutional accountability, it situates its practices within international contexts of orientalism and othering. We see these in the work of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a German Expressionist art movement, and later, as artists recycle racist tropes and thin interests in other countries during the post-war period.
In ‘New Beginnings from Old Roots’, we see how Cobra artists praised the ‘pure’ and ‘spontaneous’ forms of extra-European art – all code words for child-like forms, implicitly infantilising and romanticising other countries. In the background, we hear Surinamese jazz, another medium, along with blues and gospel music, banned by the Nazis as Degenerate Art.
Music often crops up in the Stedelijk, alongside visual arts, posters, and sculpture; a model in multidisciplinary curation. It also goes beyond direct Dutch colonial encounters, engaging with contemporary works by artists based in Asia, including Nalini Malani in India, and Yayoi Kusama in Japan.
Kusama’s sculpture debuted in Amsterdam in 1963, its stiff, phallic forms nodding to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (It arrived six years before Yoko Ono and John Lennon occupied their room at the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam, for their infamous ‘Bed Peace’.) At the time, the artist was relatively unknown, and the only woman to exhibit with the Zero (Nul) Group. But seeing it today brings us back to the boats and ships that first connected Japan and Asia with the Netherlands – and continue to do so in art.
Place names are used in accordance with the captions in each institution.
The Elise Wessels Collection is on show in the Rijksmuseum until 16 April 2023.
The permanent collection at the Stedelijk Museum is on show now.
