Le Japonisme Architectural En France, 1550-1930

This book studies the genesis of the taste for Japanese architecture in the West. This taste, born long before what 19th century art critics called Japonism, can be seen in a multitude of objects: screens, porcelains, lacquers, engravings, photographs, interior decorations or garden pavilions.

This richly illustrated book presents extraordinary historical and archaeological studies of the most famous buildings that marked the apogee of Japanese art: the pavilions of the Parisian Universal Exhibitions between 1867 and 1900, the first Japanese house set up in France (1886), the Salle de fêtes on the rue de Babylone (1896), known as La Pagode cinema, the factories of Albert Kahn's Japanese garden (1897) (our cover), the Salle des cigognes, a décor recovered by Émile Guimet in 1911. These investigations reveal the mechanisms of a Japanese-French crossbreeding in artistic production, which are essential for understanding the Japanese spaces so appreciated by Westerners.