Jo (Shihui) Wang La Japonaise and Rue du Caire: The Artistic Colonialism in the late 19th century France The second half of the 19th century was a time of unprecedented changes in European society. Commerce developed with the Industrial Revolution; technological innovations produced an increasingly material world; and colonial empires expanded tremendously into various continents. As a result of the commercial relationships with the colonies and the rest of the world, Europe was engaging with an unprecedented variety and depth of cultural exchanges. Looking at the refreshingly exotic forms of foreign art from the point of view of great imperial powers, European artists sought to incorporate the Oriental elements into European society as a means to either strengthen the existing conventions of the society, or to undermine them. One example of this phenomenon was the construction of a street named Rue du Caire as part of the Worlds’ Fair Exposition in Paris in 1889. Another example was the painting titled La Japonaise by Claude Monet in 1876. Both La Japonaise and the Rue du Caire appropriated and modified Eastern artistic elements to meet the imaginations and needs of the French viewers of the 19th century. However, their executions varied because of their respective forms of art as well as the existing perceptions held by West towards the two different societies. Both the painting La Japonaise and the architecture of the Rue du Caire’s appropriated Oriental artistic elements and reproduced them within the context of 19th century France. The art of Egypt and Japan, two exotic cultures that came into contact with France, due to trade and colonial expansion, influenced the choices of the subject matters of the pieces as well as the styles in which they were executed. In the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, the Rue du Caire consisted of twenty-five houses constructed in the Champ de Mars that represented the various historical architectural styles of Cairo. The leading architect, Alphonse Delort de Gleon, integrated a central mosque into the Rue du Caire complex, along with other residential architecture based on Cairo, including bazaars, cafes and shops (Fig. 2). In the center of the Rue du Caire stood the miniature reconstruction of the Qaytbay Mosque from the Sultan Qaytbay’s funerary complex. It included an elegant and slender stone minaret, with a smooth bulb on top and a fully ornamented body in high relief. The street also featured an ornamented porch leading to the bazaar. Shops opened along the street, with decorated ancient woodwork above the doors. Gleon used musharabiyyas - window, door and other decorative details of the buildings that were recycled from the fragments of demolishing buildings in Cairo – in order to increase the authenticity of the street. Similarly, the painting La Japonaise by Claude Monet depicted a French bourgeoisie woman identified as Monet’s wife, Camille, dressed in an elaborate kimono with a Japanese fan in her hand, in a room filled with Japanese decorations (Fig. 1). The alarming red shade of the kimono occupied the majority of the space on the canvass, and became the visual focus of the painting rather than the woman herself. Intricate patterns of flowers and leaves spread across the top half of the kimono, while an eye-catching warrior figure holding a sword in a dynamic pose decorated the bottom half of the kimono. The kimono draped from Camille’s body to create elongated and elegant curves on the back, waist and legs, spreading out into a bell-shaped hem on the carpet. Madame Monet turns her face sideways to look at the viewer, smiling subtly while holding a Japanese paper fan next to her face and her soft blond curls. Behind her, fans of various sizes and designs of discernibly Japanese motifs decorated the wall and are scattered on the floor. In contrast, the fan Madame Monet is holding in her hand consists of red, white and blue, the tricolor of France. A carpet of an unconventional and repetitive geometric design covers the floor, which is in fact a traditional Japanese mat called Tatami. The painting La Japonaise was a representative image for the school of Japonisme, regarding specifically European art, particularly French impressionism, influenced by Japanese aesthetics. After Japan opened seaports to trade with western countries in 1854, tremendous amounts of Japanese woodblock prints, especially Edo period prints in the style of Ukiyo-e, flooded into Europe. Ukiyo-e prints, meaning “pictures of the floating world” in Japanese, were characterized by the use of flat spaces, bold colors and well-defined lines, usually depicting travel scenes, beautiful women or erotica. In 1862, Monet became disillusioned by the traditional art form taught at the Beaux Arts schools in France, and, together with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, began to search for new artistic languages. Around 1871, Monet encountered Ukiyo-e prints in a print shop in Amsterdam, while he was escaping the Franco-Prussian War. At that time, Europe had been swept by a fascination of Japanese art, resulting in paintings, prints and ceramics in a combined French and Japanese style, contributing to the term Japonisme. The Japanese influence on Monet’s La Japonaise was not limited to Monet’s choice of subject matter, but also inspired the execution of the painting stylistically. Influenced by Ukiyo-e prints, Monet borrowed their stylistic characteristics. The painting that depicts the woman standing in front of a simple wall of a muted blue tone, decorated by numerous paper and bamboo fans that seem to either be hanging on the wall or pasted on it, lacks a significant perception of depth and angle of perspective. Large patches of highly saturated tones of red, yellow and blue on the kimono produce an artificial aesthetic effect. Replacing the well-defined and clearly visible lines that characterize Japanese prints, Monet painted in almost visible brushstrokes that highlighted the contrast between lightness and darkness. All these characteristics exhibited by the painting would later on become more defined and enriched to form the School of Impressionism. Although it is still not known whether Monet was inspired by the stylistic approaches of Japanese prints or was simply reconfirming his styles through the Japanese prints, common visual elements, including coloring, shading and composition, were clearly visible from each of the two. Although Europe in the 19th century had experienced an unprecedented fascination and curiosity for art and culture from both Japan and the Islamic world, the representation of the Orientalist or Japonisme art was often times modified and even distorted. Through the process of appropriating Oriental artistic elements and reproducing them in France, both Delort de Gleon and Claude Monet redefined the purpose of the object of their appropriation to serve the tastes and fantasies of French society, while the original meaning of the Oriental or Japanese artistic elements have been lost. The Rue du Caire, originally consisting of residential buildings in Cairo, served as both an object and a medium for an exotic cultural exhibition and entertainment as part of the Word’s Fair exhibition in Paris. For example, Gleon had adjusted the width of typical Arabian streets so that the railway could run through the street. This showcased that in the process of reproducing ancient Egyptian architecture, it was inevitable for architects to assimilate modern technology into the design in order for the planning of the Rue du Caire to fit into the modern city of Paris. In addition, more substantial changes were made to the purpose of the architecture on Rue du Caire in order to realize the full commercial potential of the street. To showcase the variety of architectural styles from Egypt, Delort de Gleon incorporated the Qaytbay Mosque from the Sultan Qaytbay’s funerary complex into the Rue du Caire. However, Delort did not intend for the mosque to serve any kind of religious purpose for the Islamic people residing in Paris or those brought to be the stage “cast” on the Rue du Caire from Egypt. Instead, he transformed the interior of a monumental religious building into a coffee shop with belly dancers that served and entertained French viewers who came to the street. As one Egyptian visitor, Muhammad Amin Fikri, criticized on the subject of the miniature reproduction of the mosque, “its external form as a mosque was all that there was. As for the Interior, it had been set up as a coffeehouse, where the Egyptian girls performed dances with young males.” Hence, although the architecture of the Rue du Caire originated from residential buildings in Cairo, its purpose at the Fair was not to accommodate the residents or to faithfully represent a scene of life in Cairo: it became a place of a “spectacle" that represented an Eastern fantasy. It aimed to entertain the European visitors of the Rue du Caire and to feed the curiosity of French society. Similarly, in La Japonaise, Monet appropriated several elements critical to Japanese culture and freely modified their purposes and connotations. Different from the construction of the Rue du Caire, an Arabian street exhibited for the exoticness of its Islamic identity, the painting La Japonaise emphasized the French identity underneath the Japanese artistic elements, which were used in the painting to serve a simply decorative function regardless of their original cultural connotations. The warrior figure on the radiantly red kimono that Camille wore was identified as Shok, a traditional Japanese folklore figure who drives out evil sprits, and is normally embroidered on kimonos reserved for kabuki performances or for festive functions. Yet in this painting, the connotation associated with the style and function of the kimono are lost, and the kimono is nothing more than an elaborately decorated garment that fell in line with 19th century French society’s curiosity for exotic Japanese aesthetics. The most blatant representation of the juxtaposition of different national identities comes from the fan that Madame Monet holds in her hand. Rather than a fan painted with a Japanese motif such as the ones of the fans scattered across the wall or lying on the mat, the fan held by Camille Monet consists of three colors, the French tricolor of red, blue and white. The fan is placed in such a central visual position in the painting, right next to the painted object’s face, held at an elevated position. One could argue that this symbolizes the ultimate French nationality of both the woman in the painting and of the painting itself. It accentuates the ironic contrast between French identity and the Japanese garment to emphasize the element of displacement and disharmony. In a letter Monet wrote to his friend Philippe Bury, also a prominent Japanese art collector, on October 10, 1875, Monet said that he deliberately painted the contrast between the Japanese actress’s robe and his wife Camille’s blond curls to stress the artificiality of the disguise. Even the title itself was ironic: La Japonaise literally meant “the Japanese woman” in French, yet not only did Monet know that he was painting his spouse, a French bourgeoisie woman, but also he had Camille specifically put on a blonde wig to disguise her dark curls to accentuate her Parisian identity. Monet reduced the meaning of the Japanese kimono and fans to a decorative form: the kimono becomes the costume, the fans the props, and the tatami the stage set. Combined, they become the artificial “stage” on which Monet constructed this painting. Freely borrowing artistic elements from different cultures, both Claude Monet and Delort de Gleon were part of the bourgeoisie socioeconomic class within French society who would have the privileged access to observe foreign art at a close proximity at the second half of the 19th century, when the rest of European society had only been aware of Oriental and Japanese art through secondary sources or periodical world expositions. Hence, the privilege of access was not only of a higher economic class but also of a more educated class. Delort de Gleon, a wealthy French baron, lived in Egypt for about twenty years before receiving the commission to build the Rue du Caire at the Paris World’s Fair. In fact, he had enough money to have a portrait made by Jean Leon Gerome, painter of the Orientalist painting The Snake Charmer. During his years in Cairo, Delort de Gleon had a privileged access to study not only the ideology behind Islamic architecture, but also to observe its current stage of preservation in Cairo. In fact, he ordered the paint on the buildings on Rue du Caire to be made to specifically look dirty, in an effort to resemble the actual buildings in Cairo. This, along with the creation of an Egyptian atmosphere by bringing shop owners and performers from Egypt, would not have been made possible without the architect’s personal experience of living in Cairo. Less wealthy than Delort de Gleon, Monet came from a second-generation Parisian bourgeoisie family, and Camille from a wealthy Parisian merchant family. And although Monet experienced constant economic turmoil throughout his life, he had enough resources to become an early and prolific collector of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, and even owned several kimonos, one of which Camille wore in the painting. Hence, he had significantly more access to closely examine Japanese art from an early time. He would later on continue to collect up to 231 Japanese Edo prints, and preserve them in the house at Giverny, which was also designed based on the Japanese Zen School of architecture. In order to display the unconventional content of the appropriated artistic elements, the painting and the architecture had been maneuvered to incorporate the role of the spectator as a part of their visual displays. In fact, both the painting and the architecture displayed a sense of artificially arranged spectatorship. The Rue du Caire not only displayed the architectural history of Cairo, but also the vibrant cultural and commercial aspects of life in the Arabian city, by incorporating dancers, vendors, and donkeys. In fact, the committee transported people as well as animals, such as donkeys, from Egypt to the Rue du Caire to produce an authentic atmosphere. When the visitors drank coffee, appreciated the belly dancers or made purchases from the side shops on the street, they became part of the street stage. Yet, such an arrangement of spectatorship was only made possible by the complicated efforts that went into the construction and planning of the street. Furthermore, the unconventional integration of spectatorship was not an equal relationship. According to Gleon’s own writing, some windows from the Rue du Caire were built in such a way so that the inhabitants of the building could look onto the street without being seen by the visitors (Fig.3). Therefore, the visitors to the Rue du Caire were presented with an image of the lives of Egyptian people that was carefully designed and executed by the architect, and were blocked from seeing the real lives of the inhabitants, inside of the buildings. Similarly, the arrangement of various elements in La Japonaise reflected the similar artificial spectatorship as well. Depicted in the painting, Camille Monet turned her face sideways, to gaze into the eyes of the viewer. She leaned backward in an almost impossible pose, in imitation of the female figure in the prints of Kitagawa Utamaro, the revered leader of the Ukiyo-e school of printmaking. Interestingly, a surprisingly majority of Japonisme paintings depicted women, and women were identified as the primary audience of Japonisme paintings. The dissemination of the Japonisme craze relied on women’s fascination with Japanese design, as they became the earliest and most prominent sponsors of Japanese objects for interior decoration. Yet at the same time, they were also the most common subject of both the Ukiyo-e prints from Japan and the Japonisme paintings in France, the latter romanticized and fantasized not only the idea of Japanese exotic costume, but also the idea of women who wore those costumes. Similar to the design of the Rue du Caire, the line between the subject and the object became increasingly blurred, as the assimilation of Oriental and Japanese artistic elements into western society became an interactive experience. Although both La Japonaise and Rude du Caire represented two similar larger trends of obsession with the Middle East and Japan, the underlying factors behind the popularity of Orientalism and of Japonisme were somewhat different. Primarily contributing to these factors was the mentality of artists under colonial influence. The Rue du Caire aimed to realize the commercial potential of the street, along with displaying the architectural history of Egypt. In truth, one fact that was perhaps deliberately overlooked was that the committee that oversaw the construction and design of Rue du Caire sought to profit from incorporating belly dancers in the street. Those often times nude or half nude dancers were regarded as eroticized mysterious figures from the Orient. Edmond de Goncourt’s memoirs described the Rue du Caire as virtually a red light district, comprising of lengthy descriptions of sexual fantasies triggered by the dance and by the bodies of the dancers. Thus, although different in terms of artistic forms, the incorporation of nude belly dancers, who often danced on the male visitors of the Rue du Caire, resembled the painting of The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme. They both sought to please the Western world through a fantasized display of sexuality and exoticism, while dehumanizing the people and degrading the culture on display. Yet a different mentality existed behind the proliferation of Japanese artistic elements in Western paintings. Japan, although forced to open trade by the American navy in 1854, was never a colony of any country, and remained outside the spheres of Western influence. The popularity of Japanese art was furthered by the artistic pursuits by the artists in the West, which distinguished Japonisme paintings from Orientalist paintings that sought to reinforce the idea of a colonial empire through its fantasized depiction of the foreign cultures. Many European artists sought to find a fresh artistic language from the Japanese prints exported to Europe, hoping to shatter the existing academic control over the stylistic creativity. The emphasis on the spirit of liberation characterizing Japanese art also prompted Western artists to use Japanese elements to evade historical artistic restrictions imposed by Western artistic society. Consequently, many Japonisme paintings were experiments of the Western artists in both content and style. Therefore, La Japonaise and the Rue du Caire are inevitably products of the historical ideas from late 19th century France. By stereotyping Asian paintings and African architecture as “primitive”, the post-Enlightment European society thus established itself as the opposite. The fantasy world constructed by the Rue du Caire emphasized the irrationality and exoticness of the East, which in turn stressed the power of the state of France as an imperial player, and its rationality of social conventions in contrast to the debauchery of the Rue du Caire. Yet, it was those same social conventions, with regards to established restrictions of the creativity of the arts, against which painters like Monet were rebelling, employing the new artistic language that integrated formal elements from Japanese art. Thus, the French reproductions and interpretations of Oriental and Japanese art were the artists’ own projections of their reactions to the artistic and socioeconomic trends of French society in the 19th century. Bibliography Çelik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs. Vol. 12. University of California Press, 1992. Çelik, Zeynep, and Leila Kinney. "Ethnography and Exhibitionisni at the Expositions Universelles," Assemblage, no. 13 (1990): 34–59. François, P. O. U. I. L. L. O. N. Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française. KARTHALA Editions, 2008. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge and New York, 1988 de Gléon, Alphonse Delort. "L’Architecture arabe des Khalifes d’Égypte à l’Exposition universelle de Paris en 1889." La Rue du Caire, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit (1889): 9. Volk, Alicia, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art (UC Press, 2010), 13-41. Weisberg, Gabriel P., and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918. Mississippi museum of art, 2011. Lacambre, Geneviève, ed. Le japonisme. Ed. de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1988. Wichmann, Siegfried. Japonisme: The Japanese influence on Western art in the 19th and 20th centuries. Harmony Books, 1981.

Appendix

Fig.1 View of the Rue du Caire, including the Egyptian cast and the Europeans. Black and White Photograph. 1889. Fig.1 View of the Rue du Caire, including the Egyptian cast and the Europeans. Black and White Photograph. 1889. Fig.3 A window on the Rue du Caire that allowed the inhabitants to look out without being seen. Black and White Photograph. 1889. Fig.3 A window on the Rue du Caire that allowed the inhabitants to look out without being seen. Black and White Photograph. 1889. Fig.2. La Japonaise, Claude Monet, 1876 Fig.2. La Japonaise, Claude Monet, 1876

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[ 1 ]. Çelik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs. Vol. 12. University of California Press, 1992.
[ 2 ]. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge and New York, 1988.
[ 3 ]. Wichmann, Siegfried. Japonisme: The Japanese influence on Western art in the 19th and 20th centuries. Harmony Books, 1981.
[ 4 ]. Lacambre, Geneviève, ed. Le japonisme. Ed. de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1988
[ 5 ]. de Gléon, Alphonse Delort. "L’Architecture arabe des Khalifes d’Égypte à l’Exposition universelle de Paris en 1889." La Rue du Caire, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit (1889): 9.
[ 6 ]. Weisberg, Gabriel P., and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918. Mississippi museum of art, 2011.
[ 7 ]. Ibid.
[ 8 ]. Weisberg, Gabriel P., and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The Orient Expressed: Japan's Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918. Mississippi museum of art, 2011.
[ 9 ]. Volk, Alicia, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art (UC Press, 2010), 13-41.