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Paper short abstract

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.