The Influence of Japanese Art on Design

Published October, 2008.

This book explores the story of the “Japan Craze” as the catalyst of modern design in Gilded Age America. Much more than a simple fad, it came at a time of radical change in both societies, as the Western yearning for the values of a past it believed were embodied in Japanese traditional arts combined with Japan’s own drive to modernity. In the process, both time-honored arts and modern manufactures from Japan became the inspiration of an international coterie of artists, dealers, and thinkers, who through word and artistic creations of their own proselytized Japanese aesthetics as a model, recreating American design to meet emerging lifestyles as the twentieth century dawned. Beginning in the Aesthetic Movement, through Arts & Crafts, and ending in the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright, through ceramics, textiles, furniture, metal crafts, silver, and glass from both nations as well as from the United Kingdom and France, in this book we see how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept.