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This paper examines the shared language of Nordic and Japanese ceramics around 1900, arguing that transcultural exchange with the “Other” enabled both regions to redefine modern national craft identities rather than merely imitate foreign styles.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the emergence of a shared stylistic language in Art Nouveau ceramics produced in the Nordic countries and Japan between c. 1890 and 1920, focusing on transcultural exchange as a formative force in modern aesthetics and national craft identities. Nordic ceramic centres such as Rörstrand, Gustavsberg, Royal Copenhagen, Bing & Grøndahl, Porsgrund, and Egersund developed distinctive Art Nouveau idioms that combined international stylistic trends with Japonisme and motifs drawn from local nature. Japanese ceramics circulating in Northern Europe were valued for their materiality, surface treatments, and organic ornament, and played a significant role in shaping modern Nordic design languages.

At the same time, Japanese ceramics of the early twentieth century reveal an intensified engagement with Western artistic, technical, and institutional paradigms. Japanese potters increasingly travelled to Europe, engaged with contemporary European ceramicists, and gained access to Western art and design publications such as The Studio, Jugend, and L’Art Moderne. Moreover, newly established Japanese craft schools and museums deliberately assembled “sample collections” of Western ceramics for educational purposes, including numerous Nordic examples from the studios and factories listed above. These collections incorporated contemporary European works alongside Japanese traditional earthenware and porcelain. As a result, Japanese ceramic production of this period—by artists such as Miyagawa Kōzan, Itaya Hazan, the Nishiura Ceramic Company, the Fukagawa Company, Kinkōzan Sōbei, and Tominaga Genroku—aligned closely with international Art Nouveau aesthetics.

Rather than framing these developments in terms of bidirectional yet unilateral influences (Japan → West, West → Japan), this paper approaches them through the lens of transculturation, and interprets them as a long-lasting dialogue. It asks whether direct engagement with the visual culture of the “Other” primarily shaped modern craft languages, or whether such encounters enabled artists and institutions to rethink, re-evaluate, and rearticulate their own traditional cultural “essences” through renewed attention to material, technique, and ornament. By examining ceramics as a medium situated between art, craft, and industry, the paper argues that transcultural exchange was instrumental in redefining modern national art in Japan, while simultaneously informing parallel developments in Northern Europe.

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The paper examines the reception of Utagawa Hiroshige’s (1797–1858) prints in turn-of-the-century Poland, focusing on Feliks Jasieński's (1861–1929) collection. It studies how politics of cultural appropriation shaped Hiroshige’s positioning within Polish Japonisme and debates on national art.

Paper long abstract

Recent years have witnessed renewed scholarly and curatorial interest in Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) across institutional and cultural contexts. This revival is evident both in the public museums outside Japan e.g. in the British Museum exhibition "Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road" (2024), and in contemporary Japanese art, where Hiroshige has been reactivated in Takashi Murakami’s exhibition "Japonisme: Cognitive Revolution, Learning from Hiroshige" (Gagosian, New York, 2025), staged by a global commercial gallery. This diversity of contexts and concepts invites reconsideration of the reception of Hiroshige in relation to processes of global cultural exchange and cultural appropriation involved in Japonisme. Interestingly, while nineteenth-century French Japonisme tended to privilege figures such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the situation was different in other European contexts. This paper focuses on Poland at the turn of the nineteenth century, where Hiroshige figured centrally in the collection of Feliks Jasieński (1861–1929), who assembled over 2,000 of prints authored by him, with a strong emphasis on landscape. The paper examines cultural, economic, and political factors that contributed to the prominence of Hiroshige in the context of stateless Poland, and how the specific conditions of political partition and cultural displacement shaped local engagements with Japanese art at the time. By bringing together contemporary reactivations of Hiroshige with historical reception practices in Poland, the paper aims to contribute to a critical rethinking of Japonisme, not as a neutral aesthetic repertoire of stylistic exchange, but as a heterogeneous transcultural and political process through which national art and cultural identity were, and continue to be, constructed.

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The Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors’s paintings of nature have become synonymous with so-called national art. This paper juxtaposes turn of the century discourse on the perceived need for national art with Liljefors’s visual expression deeply influenced by Japanese art and japonisme.

Paper long abstract

Few artists have done more to visually define Swedish nature than the painter Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939). Through close studies of predators and animals of prey such as hares, foxes, cats, ducks, and birds of prey, Liljefors forged a powerful image of Swedish wildlife that has come to occupy a canonical position within narratives of national art. Yet this seemingly “native” vision of nature emerged through profoundly transnational visual practices.

Partly trained in Paris at the height of the dissemination of Japonisme, Liljefors developed a pictorial language shaped by transcultural circulation rather than national isolation. His working methods further complicate notions of authenticity: while living in a country house outside Stockholm, he maintained an extensive menagerie of semi-domesticated and wild animals, conducted systematic studies of living specimens, and made use of photographic techniques, including staged photographs of taxidermied animals posed within natural settings. These practices informed a visual style characterized by radical cropping, asymmetrical composition, flattened pictorial space, and dynamic viewpoints features closely aligned with Japanese art and its European reception.

What makes Liljefors a particularly productive case study for examining the presence of Japanese visual culture in Sweden is the paradoxical reception of his work as exemplary national art. His contemporary and close associate Richard Bergh, an artist, museum director, and theorist, conducted a twenty year long campaign to define national art through direct engagement with nature. Liljefors art posed simultaneously a solution in its focus on Swedish wild life, and a problem by its visual language. Through influential collectors such as the banker Ernst Thiel, Liljefors’ work became foundational to Swedish conceptions of national art around 1900.

This paper examines how ideas about nature and its artistic representation circulated transnationally by juxtaposing Swedish debates on national art with the visual strategies employed in Liljefors’ paintings.

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The paper examines how Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński used exhibitions, his public apartment museum, workshops, and press publications on Japanese art to educate Polish society, including women, fostering an emerging Polish national style.

Paper long abstract

Feliks "Manggha" Jasieński (1861–1929) stands as a pioneering figure in promoting knowledge of Japanese art and culture in Poland. As a noted art critic and collector based in Warsaw and Kraków, Jasieński developed innovative methods for disseminating cultural knowledge, including maintaining a private museum in his apartment that was open to the public, involvement in artistic workshops and multiple articles in Polish press. His activities constituted a distinctive form of cultural policy aimed at educating and inspiring society toward self-development and creative advancement towards Polish national style. What’s innovative, his actions were also aimed directly at women.

Jasieński's background, which included journeys to Berlin and Paris, equipped him with the knowledge and networks necessary to become a prominent collector and art critic. From the early 20th century onward, he published regularly in major Polish periodicals such as Chimera, Głos Narodu, and Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny, while simultaneously curating exhibitions across Warsaw, Kraków, Lviv, and Kiev and he also supported the Krakow Workshops, in which female folk artists from the Krakow area were involved.

What makes Jasieński's work particularly significant from a 21st-century perspective is how he presented Japanese aesthetics and methodologies as inherently valuable models for Polish artistic and cultural development. His way of drawing inspiration from Japanese art to inspire Polish artists and craftsmen seems surprisingly actual also today. In an era of globalization, his pioneering efforts to contextualize and celebrate non-European artistic traditions demonstrate prescient thinking about cultural exchange and intercultural learning.

This paper presents a few specific examples of Jasieński's activities to illustrate the instrumental role his Japanese art collection, played in inspiring artists, craftsmen, and educators within Polish society. By reexamining his legacy through contemporary lenses, the study offers valuable insights into how individual collectors and critics can function as agents of cultural policy and cross-cultural understanding.