Kimono – Reflections of Art between Japan and the West

“KIMONO – Reflections of art between Japan and the West” is the title of the new exhibition organized by the Textile Museum of Prato in collaboration with the Museum of Fashion and Applied Arts of Gorizia. The exhibition gained the prestigious patronage of the Japanese Embassy in Italy.

The kimonos, all datable to the first and second quarter of the Twentieth Century, are undisputed witnesses of the extraordinary and reciprocal artistic and stylistic contaminations that occurred in those decades between Japan and the West.

The exhibition explores the creative and cultural exchange between Europe and Japan, through the display of works that bear witness to the fundamental passages between the end of the Nineteenth Century and the first half of the Twentieth Century.
The well-known phenomenon of Japonism is illustrated: how the artistic expressions of European art of that period drew on and reinterpreted the expressive and decorative language of Japanese art, represented in the exhibition by works by Hiroshige, Utamaro and Hokusai.
In reverse, the exhibition explains the opposite process: the phenomenon of Westernism. Thisi is an aspect which is little known to most: the influence of Western culture and artistic expression in Japanese art, as seen in the kimono.
The kimonos on display, in textured, embroidered or printed silk, testify to the attraction for the West. They clearly show the influences coming from the formal innovations of the European avant-gardes such as Futurism, Secession and Cubism which profoundly changed the traditional Japanese decorative language at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.