New Volume Examines Influence of East Asian Art on European Painting

This insightful book shows how Chinese and Japanese notions of space disrupted prevailing design concepts in Early Modern Europe

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East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Author

Isabelle Tillerot

East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe book cover
Oct 10, 2023

This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian materials and published descriptions of Chinese gardens inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe.

With particular focus on French interiors, author Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art. East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Getty Research Institute, $75) presents a history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended European paradigms of display.

Author Information

Isabelle Tillerot is a specialist in 18th-century art. She has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Universities of Lausanne and Paris Nanterre; and the American University of Paris. She is the author of three books, including Jean de Jullienne et les collectionneurs de son temps: Un regard singulier sur le tableau (2010), which received the Prix Marianne Roland Michel from the Institut de France, and Beautés arbitraires: Essai sur l’imagination à l’époque moderne (2021), which was awarded a Bourse aux auteurs from the Centre national du livre of the French Ministère de la Culture. Her current project, “L’intrigue du fragment au XVIIIe siècle: Bris et éclats d’une trace,” won the Prix Résidence d’auteur from the Fondation des Treilles in 2022.

East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe

$70/£60

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