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 Japonisme and Bonnard’s
Invention of the Modern Poster
David E. Gliem
Eckerd College

Abstract: Soon after Japan was opened to the West in the 1850s, large
numbers of Japanese works of art were exported to Europe and Amer-
ica. Western artists, excited by the novelty of Japanese art, eagerly ad-
opted and adapted Japanese aesthetics to their own creative efforts. The
fascination these artists held for Japan and its culture was but one small
part of a much broader appreciation of Japan, a phenomenon dubbed
Japonisme in 1872 by the art critic Philippe Burty. Japonisme reached
the peak of its influence around 1890, the same time that Pierre Bon-
nard, a young French artist and member of the symbolist group, the
Nabis, was formulating a new approach to poster design. A keen ad-
mirer and student of Japanese art, Bonnard applied what he learned of
Japanese aesthetics to the style of his first lithographed poster, France-
Champagne. Innovative in its use of a flat, reductive composition and
synthesis between text and image—design elements borrowed from the
Japanese—this work ushered in a new era of poster design.

The adoration for Japanese art, especially woodblock prints, in France

and other Western countries contributed greatly in the late nine-
teenth century to the promotion of printmaking in general and, in
particular, to a greater experimentation with the color-lithographed
poster. Introduced by Jules Chéret in 1869, the color poster did
not become widespread until a decade later, during which time the

17
18 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

technique of color lithography and mechanical reproduction were

further refined.1 Mounting appreciation for the color poster dur-
ing the 1880s spurred by these technical improvements, by the large
numbers of exhibitions of Japanese prints, and by Chéret’s lively new
work, led eventually to the poster’s recognition as a serious art form.
Public and critical acknowledgment of the poster as work of art was
marked by a number of seminal events during the 1880s: an exhibi-
tion of posters held in the Passage Vivienne in 1884, the inclusion
of Chéret in Henri Beraldi’s Graveurs du XIX Siècle, published in
1885, and a landmark exhibition on the history of the poster held
in 1889 at the Exposition Universelle, the first such exhibition in
France where, importantly, Chéret was awarded a gold medal.2
During the 1890s an increasing number of prominent artists
tried their hands at chromolithography and poster making. The best
known of these designers was and perhaps still is Henri Toulouse-
Lautrec whose ingenious, eye-catching posters produced during this
decade quickly overshadowed those of the prolific Jules Chéret—as
many as 200,000 of his posters were hung in Paris every year while
most other designers produced pale adaptations of his style.3 The
most historically significant poster to appear at this time, however,
was not one made by either Toulouse-Lautrec or Chéret but rather
by a young artist named Pierre Bonnard. This poster, France-Cham-
pagne, in addition to being Bonnard’s first poster was, surprisingly,
also his first professional work; it was commissioned in 1889 by E.
Debray, a vintner located not far from Reims (Figure 1).
The poster features a youthful coquette who holds a glass of
champagne out of which spills a bubbling effervescence. A thin, con-
tinuous scalloped line forms the bubbles and repeats in miniature
the undulating line of her coiffure and dress. Her left hand grasps a

1 Robert Goldwater, “L’Affiche Moderne: A Revival of Poster Art after 1880,”

Gazette des Beaux-Arts 22 (1942): 176. See also Phillip Dennis Cate, The Color
Revolution: Color Lithography in France, 1890-1900 (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake
City, 1978): vii.
2 Victor Champier, “L’Exposition des Affiches Illustrées de M. Jules Chèret,”
Revue des Arts Décoratifs 10 (1889-1890): 254, 257.
3 Felicien Chamsaur, “Le Roi de l’Affiche,” La Plume 110 (November 15,
1893): 480.
 19

closed fan that underscores the lively script written boldly in black
across the top. This text and the outlines that give shape and con-
tain the forms create a striking contrast against the vibrating yellow
background making the poster intelligible at some distance. In ad-
dition, Bonnard successfully integrated the lettering into the overall
design, an effect he achieved by hand-drawing the words rather than
producing them from stock type forms.

Figure 1.
Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France.
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
20 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

Bold and original in its conception, Bonnard’s poster immedi-

ately struck a chord with the critics and art loving public. France-
Champagne appeared on the streets of Paris in March 1891 (the
two-year delay in production was likely due to the artist’s military
duty) and already by June of that year the art critic Félix Fénéon
hailed it as “that celebrated poster.... A poster superior to those of
Appel and Levy without—thank goodness!—being by Chéret or
Grasset.”4 What Fénéon and others detected as special in Bonnard’s
poster was his novel design, the visual strategies of which are still
used in print advertisements to this day: a simple yet eye-catching
image in which the lettering complements the pictorial elements,
the result of which is an immediate and “psychologically persuasive”
revelation of ideas that does not resort to superfluous narrative con-
tent to hold the viewer’s attention.5
Comparatively, posters by Jules Chéret and other designers re-
veal their indebtedness to academic image-making conventions
(Figure 2). The style Chéret and other poster artists emulated was
the eighteenth-century Rococo complete with its confection of pas-
tel colors, light and airy compositions and general feel of lascivious
frivolity. Still beholden to the Western preference for illusionism,
many of these posters have naturalistic color, modeling and atmo-
spheric perspective. In addition, the compositions tend to be overly
complicated and the subject matter highly anecdotal. And in keep-
ing with common practice, the text was added after the pictorial ele-
ments were completed. More often than not the lettering was added
by a specialist and not by the artist. In fact, it is well known that
throughout his career Chéret employed a lettering artist to do this
work for him.6 For this reason, the textual elements and the images
are often discontinuous.
The historical importance of Bonnard’s poster was recognized
early on. Octave Mirbeau, writing in 1908, reflected:

4 Félix Fénéon, “Sur les murs,” Le Chat noir 490 ( June 6, 1891): 1760.
5 Helen Giambruni, “Early Bonnard, 1885-1900” (PhD. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 1983), 83-84.
6 Lucy Broido, The Posters of Jules Chéret (New York: Dover Publications,
1980), xiii.
 21

The first poster-print since Daumier to burst triumphantly onto the walls
of Paris, a complete departure from the prettily colored effusions of Chéret,
France-Champagne, now unobtainable, is the work of Bonnard. It brought
about a revival of the art of lithography—which Toulouse-Lautrec was to
develop to such a degree of sophistication and skill.7

A landmark in the history of graphic design, France-Champagne

is the product of a confluence of special historical circumstances.
The most significant factor motivating Bonnard’s creative process
was the Japonisme phenomenon, which reached a fevered pitch in
Paris at the same moment that Bonnard emerged as an artist and
began to formulate the aesthetic and philosophical bases for his art.
His conception of Japanese art and its formal principles was colored
by his close affiliation with the Nabis, whose commonly held beliefs
about art and life gave shape to his work throughout his long career.
Reconstructing how all of these elements merged in and around
1890 will help us understand how they provided the young artist
with the justification and inspiration to push poster design in new
directions.
In 1888, while Bonnard was attending the Académie Julian,
he met and befriended the artists Edouard Vuillard, Paul Sérusier,
Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson and Henri-Gabriel Ibels. Together
with the scholar Auguste Cazalis, they constituted the core group of
individuals who eventually formed a coterie and called themselves
the Nabis, a name based on the Hebrew word for “prophet.” Over
the course of the next eight years, the Nabis’ apostolate increased
in number and their intimacy grew.8 They met regularly in a local
bistro and every Saturday at Ranson’s studio, which became “Le
Temple” and his wife, France, its “Lumière.” There they had spirited
discussions about philosophy, religion, music, poetry, and formulat-
ed their views about art. During these years they also exhibited and,
7 Francis Bouvet, Bonnard: The Complete Graphic Work, trans. Jane Brenton
(New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 5.
8 The most active members of the group were Bonnard, Denis, Ibels, Lacombe,
Maillol, Ranson, Rippl-Ronnaï, Roussel, Sérusier, Vallotton, Verkade and Vuillard.
The artist René Piot also knew Bonnard and the others but soon broke away from
the group and was, therefore, never an “official” member of the Nabis; George L.
Mauner, The Nabis: Their History and Their Art, 1888-1896 (New York and Lon-
don: Garland Publishing, 1978), 16.
22 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

in association with writers and poets, worked on decorative projects

together. Although their close collaboration as artists more or less
came to an end in 1896, the Nabis continued to remain friends for
the rest of their lives.

Figure 2.
Jules Chéret, Carnaval (poster for the Théâtre de l’Opéra) from “Les maîtres de
l’affiche,” 1896. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, The New York Public Library,
New York, NY. Photo Credit: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY.
 23

What excited the Nabis most, and Bonnard especially, was the
art pouring into the West from Japan. The Nabis were led to Japa-
nese art, in part, through their study of Manet, Whistler, and the
other artists who early-on had come under its spell, and then were
encouraged by the many Japanese print shows of the time. Maurice
Denis, the unofficial spokesman for the group, commented that the
potency of Japanese art “spread like leaven” through the whole Nabi
movement.9
The Nabis’ thirst for Japanese culture and its art was but one
small part of a much larger phenomenon that took hold of the West-
ern world. Not long after the American Commodore Matthew C.
Perry opened the island nation’s borders in 1853, art objects from
Japan flooded into the United States and European countries at an
astonishing volume, rate and variety.10 Paintings on silk, fine porce-
lains, delicate fans, colorful ukiyo-e, multi-paneled screens, fanciful
netsuke, richly decorated lacquered objects, exquisite bronzes and
copiously illustrated books were scooped-up and coveted as prized
possessions by collectors and artists eager to be the first to obtain
the newest and most novel wares from this exotic country.11 Within
a matter of a few short years, nearly every studio and avant-garde
salon had its pile of kimonos, its fans and woodcuts pinned to the
wall.
This craze for everything Japanese quickly pervaded all strata of
society, and the range of interests was just as diverse: from those who
were simply entranced by dreams of exotic peoples, who continued
the romantic dialogue with foreign cultures begun earlier in the cen-
tury; to those who undertook a more serious quest to examine and
understand fully Japanese life and culture. On the one hand, Japan’s

9 Colta Feller Ives, The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on
French Prints (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974), 56.
10 The best historical account of the opening of Japan to the West is still A.
Walworth, Black Ships Off Japan: The Story of Commodore Perry’s Expedition (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
11 Europe had limited access to Japanese art before trade relations were estab-
lished; see Phylis Floyd, “Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese
Imagery in Europe in Nineteenth-Century Public Collections,” The Art Bulletin 68,
no. 1 (March 1986): 105-141.
24 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

material culture, especially its arts, became the locus of everything

fashionable. By 1880, Japanese objets d’art—whether authentic or
mass-produced for the Western market—could be found gracing
the windows of expensive boutiques and the counters of department
stores throughout Paris, London and New York. This popular taste
for things Japanese also manifested itself in a succession of novels,
travel books, plays and operas set in the Land of the Rising Sun. On
the other hand, Japan and the other Asian countries soon became the
focus of serious academic scrutiny. Major collections of Japanese art
were formed and, in France, the first museum devoted to Asian art
and religions was founded. Many public exhibitions of Japanese art
were organized and habitually drew huge crowds of curious onlook-
ers, astute devotees and enthusiasts; Japan’s pavilions at the Universal
Expositions were always very popular. European and American intel-
lectuals, writers, and artists frequently traveled to Japan, and many
young Japanese attended Western schools to study science, medi-
cine, engineering and art. Subsequently, books and journals devoted
to Asian artistic, economic, social and cultural history appeared in
copious numbers and Western visual and literary arts displayed a
range of Asian aesthetic and iconographic influences.
The utter totality with which the West sought to absorb the cul-
tural life of Japan was first recognized in 1872 by the French art crit-
ic, Philippe Burty. In a series of articles, Burty labeled this phenome-
non Japonisme, in order “to designate a new field of study—artistic,
historic and ethnographic.”12 As Burty made clear, Japonisme was a
rather broadly based and far-reaching affair and came to influence
the West on so many levels. Certainly, not since the Renaissance had

12 Philippe Burty, “Félix Buhot, Painter and Etcher,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 76 (February 1888): 333-334; Philippe Burty, “Japonisme I,” La Renais-
sance littéraire et artistique 1 (May 1872): 25-26; this article was the first in a series
devoted to the study of the movement, see also in the same periodical: “Japonisme
II,” ( June 1872): 59-60; “Japonisme III,” ( July 1872): 83-84; “Japonisme IV,” ( July
1872): 106-107; “Japonisme V,” (August 1872), 122-123; “Japonisme VI,” (Febru-
ary 1873): 3-5. For an account of Burty’s activities as an art critic and important
collector of Japanese art see Gabriel Weisberg, The Independent Critic: Philippe
Burty and the Visual Arts of Mid-Nineteenth Century France (New York: P. Lang,
1993).
 25

the West so completely embraced and assimilated with unbridled

enthusiasm and vigor the essence of another culture as it did with
Japan during the last half of the nineteenth century.
For much of its early history Japonisme’s influence on the visual
arts was localized, as knowledge of Japan and its culture was scant at
best. But beginning in the early 1880s and throughout the 1890s,
Japanese art was promoted by some very influential scholars, critics,
dealers, and collectors in elaborate exhibitions and in highly infor-
mative and visually stunning publications. For instance, in France,
the first publication and exhibition to support a deeper apprecia-
tion of the pictorial arts of Japan appeared in 1883. In April of that
year Louis Gonse organized an extensive exhibition at the Galerie
Georges Petit to coincide with the publication of his two-volume
survey L’Art japonais.13 Gonse’s exhibition was unprecedented in its
scope and revealed to the French public the merits of a whole range
of Japanese art. Critical reviews of Gonse’s exhibition and book all
described how he had helped change Western attitudes “from fad
to serious inspiration.”14 Encouraged by the enthusiasm for Gonse’s
efforts, many more exhibitions, both large and small, of Japanese art
quickly followed. In 1887 Vincent van Gogh organized a small show
of ukiyo-e at the café Le Tambourin. The following year, in May of
1888, Siegfried Bing displayed Japanese woodcuts in his gallery on
the rue de Provence. In the same year the Société de Noir et Blanc,
“devoted to black and white, that is to say, to drawings and prints,”
included a Japanese section in their bi-annual exhibition.15 And in
1889, Japan was again represented in the International Exhibition in
Paris as it was in the two previous French fairs.
The first major exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris was orga-
nized by Siegfried Bing and held at the École Nationale des Beaux-
arts from April 25 to May 31, 1890. The show featured an amazing

13 Louis Gonse, Exposition rétrospective de l’Art japonais (Paris, 1883); Louis

Gonse, L’Art japonais, 2 vols. (Paris: Quentin, 1883).
14 Gabriel P. Weisburg, Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1986), 20.
15 Catalogue illustré de l’Exposition internationale de Blanc et Noir, Société de
noir et blanc (Paris: E. Bernard, 1888).
26 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

1,146 single sheet prints and albums.16 Bing mounted this exhibi-
tion because he believed, like Gonse, that the vogue for Japanese art
and culture overtaking America and Europe had the real potential
to transform Western culture and, in particular, artistic practice. To
bolster his efforts to elevate the West’s response to Japanese art and
culture from whimsy to that of serious inquiry and study, Bing also
undertook the publication of the magazine Artistic Japan, which
appeared in monthly installments from mid-1888 until 1891. Bing
devised the magazine so that it would appeal to a varied audience.
To this end, Artistic Japan was published in French, German and
English and included many lavish illustrations to accompany essays
written by leading Japonists of the day. Bing’s magazine became an
especially valuable reference for artists, like Pierre Bonnard, inter-
ested in learning more about Japanese art.
Though the magazine was very broad in its scope, its core mes-
sage advocated that the West study the art of Japan with the goal
of reaching an understanding of the values and principles that mo-
tivated its creation. Bing felt that Western artists, immersed in the
novelty of Japanese art and eager to appeal to popular tastes, fell vic-
tim to hurried interpretations of Japanese models or, even worse, re-
sorted to perfunctory imitation. Western artists, Bing hoped, would
glean the values and principles inherent in Japanese art and then
apply what they learned to their own creative efforts.17 Among the
publications that appeared at this time with the aim of educating the
public about the art and culture of Japan, few were as successful or as
visually sumptuous as Artistic Japan.
During the 1890s Bing was a strong supporter of many avant-
garde artists including the Nabis. He believed that many up-and-
coming artists needed a place to exhibit their work. And he was also
looking for a way to promote and elevate the status of the decora-
tive arts in France and to show how this goal could be achieved by
emulating the Japanese. What was needed, he determined in 1894
after returning from a trip to the United States, was a salon to show

16 Exposition de la gravure japonaise ouverte á l’Ecole des Beaux-Art (Paris,

1890).
17 Bing, S. [iegfried]. “Programme,” Artistic Japan 1, no. 1 (May 1888): 5.
 27

Japanese art in conjunction with ceramics, furniture, jewelry, prints

and paintings produced by France’s finest young artists who were
demonstrating a certain influence from the Japanese. Called the Sa-
lons of Art Nouveau, Bing started these exhibitions in December of
1895. Many of the Nabis, including Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard, Ibels,
Ranson and Roussel regularly participated in these events. Thus, in
concert with his publication Artistic Japan, Bing used his gallery and
Salons to promote the decorative arts, Japanese art, and French art
and artists whose work best demonstrates a sound grasp of Japanese
aesthetic principles.18
Within this intensified investigation and evaluation of Japanese
art, two articles were published that introduced new criteria for
designing posters that reflect an assimilation of Japanese aesthetic
principles.19 The first and best known of these articles, “Les Af-
fiches illustrées,” was published in December 1884 by the Gazette
des Beaux-Arts.20 In this first serious historical study of the poster,
Ernest Maindron advocated that artists use a simple composition,
an “elegance” of line, color employed in masses for decorative effect,
and lively lettering that contributes to the whole. All these, he not-
ed, must be combined to yield a striking design of the sort that was
thought inherent in Japanese art. Louis Gonse, the director of the
magazine at the time, undoubtedly considered the publication of
Maindron’s article a key opportunity to promote Japanese aesthet-
ics as the basis for the renewal of poster design, an art form that was
slowly moving out of obscurity and into the limelight. The other
article, “L’Exposition des affiches illustrées,” was written by Victor
Champier and published in the Revue des arts décoratif in 1889-

18 Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Samuel Bing: Patron of Art Nouveau, Part II: Bing’s
Salons of Art Nouveau,” The Connoisseur 172, no. 694 (December 1969): 294-
299.
19 Helen Giambruni, “Early Bonnard, 1885-1900” (PhD. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 1983), 83-85, 304n20.
20 Ernest Maindron, “Les Affiches illustrées,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 2, no. 30
(December 1884): 546-547. Maindron’s book, Les Affiches illustrées (Paris: H. Lau-
nette & Cie, 1886) appeared two years later. This was the first book ever published
on the illustrated poster.
28 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

1890.21 To Maindron’s criteria for poster design, Champier added

the requirement of a clearly intelligible iconography, an aspect, as
already mentioned, not found in most posters of the period.
These new criteria for poster design Bonnard would have found
in keeping with the ideas of his fellow Nabis. France-Champagne,
like much of Bonnard’s oeuvre, exemplifies the fundamental aims of
the Nabis, which as Denis publicly proclaimed in 1890, required
that a work of art appeal to the beholder through the ability of
its lines and colors to explain themselves. 22 For models the Nabis
turned to Japanese art and other so-called “primitive” art. Not only
did the Nabis attend exhibitions of Japanese art, but many of them
also amassed quite impressive collections of Japanese screens, objets
d’art and prints. Regarding his discovery of Japanese prints, Bonnard
explained to Gaston Diehl in 1943: “I covered the walls of my room
with this naïve and gaudy imagery. To me, Gauguin and Sérusier al-
luded to the past. But what I had in front of me was something tre-
mendously alive and extremely clever.”23
Not surprisingly, Bonnard’s contemporaries were quick to point
out France-Champagne’s affinities with Japanese prints. The Neo-
Impressionist painter and Japanese art enthusiast Paul Signac wrote:
“…if one were to trace its outlines, one would get the contours of an
Utamaro.”24 Along with Hokusai and Hiroshige, Utamaro was one of
the most admired Japanese artists in the West (Figure 3). Utamaro’s
woodcuts were certainly known to Bonnard who would have seen
them in any number of exhibitions and publications. Incidentally,
Edmond de Goncourt, the self-proclaimed discoverer of Japanese
art, wrote an important book on the life and art of Utamaro that
was published in 1891, the year Bonnard released his poster.25 Given
21 Victor Champier, “L’Exposition des affiches illustrées,” Revue des arts déc-
oratif (1889-1890): 256.
22 Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Crit-
ics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 94, 99.
23 Gaston Diehl, “Pierre Bonnard dans son univers enchanté,” Comoedia (10
July 1943), n.p. Bonnard owned works by Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada and
Yoshikura.
24 Ives, The Great Wave, 57.
25 Edmond de Goncourt, Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes. L’Art japonais
au XVIII siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891). Goncourt’s subtitle, “the
 29

the popularity of Utamaro in France, Bonnard must have considered

emulating this Japanese master a prudent decision so as to help as-
sure his poster’s success. Thematically, too, Bonnard’s poster with its

Figure 3.
Kitagawa Utamaro, Uwaki no so (The fancy-free type), ca 1792-93.
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY.
Photo Credit: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY.
30 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

tipsy hostess shares a great deal with Utamaro who was celebrated
for his representations of beautiful women whether the wives and
daughters of wealthy businessmen or courtesans. An attractive, sexu-
ally assertive woman was also a key character in Chéret’s advertising
repertoire. This buxom, long-legged blond came to be known as the
Chérette. Bonnard seems to have taken the Chérette added some-
thing of the provocative allure of Utamaro’s beauties and imbued his
poster with an electricity not found in either master’s work.
For this dynamism Bonnard looked instead to the actor wood-
cuts of the Torii school (Figure 4). These eighteenth-century Japa-
nese printmakers, contemporaries of Utamaro, were celebrated for
their energetic compositions achieved through surprisingly limited
means: varied and dynamic calligraphic line, plain flat backgrounds,
and a simplified palette consisting primarily of red-orange, bright
and muted yellows, and lacquer-black. On the Torii, Théodore Du-
ret wrote in 1888 in Artistic Japan: “They produced figures of actors
printed in a sombre tone, but very vigorous, and which must form
the foundation of every collection of coloured prints.”26 Duret even
stated his preference for early eighteenth-century Japanese prints
over those made during the nineteenth century. He explained, “The
larger coloured engravings of the present lose the elegance which
characterised those of the last century. They have not the same har-
mony of lines and soberness of colouring….”27 Bonnard saw many
examples of these rare woodcuts at Bing’s exhibition, which was the
first to show in Europe large numbers of Torii prints. In addition,
the unprecedented chronological organization of Bing’s exhibition
revealed the early historical origins of the Torii school and the sig-
nificance of its members to the introduction and development of
printmaking in Japan. Bonnard and the Nabis likely viewed the Torii
printmakers much as they viewed themselves, as artists giving birth
to new forms of creative expression. The Nabis eagerly assimilated
the artistic styles of these visionary artists, and others like them, be-
painter of greenhouses,” makes reference to Utamaro’s interest in brothel scenes and
prostitutes.
26 Théodore Duret, “The Art of Engraving in Japan,” Artistic Japan 2 (Novem-
ber 1888): 77.
27 Duret, “The Art of Engraving in Japan,” 78.
 31

Figure 4.
Torii Kiyonobu, The Actor Ichikawa Yebizo as a warrior with armor, n.d. Collection
of The Newark Museum, George T. Rockwell Collection, Inv.: 9.1356. The Newark
Museum, Newark, NJ. Photo Credit: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, NY.
32 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

cause they considered their work as yet uncorrupted by convention

and thereby direct and pure in expression. It appears, then, that Bon-
nard adapted the reductive but active style of these Japanese masters
to give his poster an emblematic character conveying in a few joyful
lines and colors the very essence of ebullience.
The bold calligraphic line Bonnard borrowed from the Torii and
used so effectively in France-Champagne was known in Symbolist
circles as the “arabesque,” which all of the Nabis identified as an es-
sential feature of Japanese art. “In the beginning,” wrote Maurice
Denis in 1890, “was the pure arabesque, as little trompe l’oeil as pos-
sible; the wall is empty, fill it with symmetrical spots of form, harmo-
nious with colors (stained-glass, Egyptian paintings, Byzantine mo-
saics, Japanese kakemonos).”28 The term “arabesque,” originally used
to refer to the spiraling, tendril-like ornament found on Moorish ar-
chitecture, had acquired broader applications by the late nineteenth
century. The concept was common among Symbolist artists, poets
and musicians who used it to describe complex visual, literary and
musical devices and stratagems. Composers such as Robert Schu-
mann and Claude Debussy, for example, used the term arabesque to
describe thematic variation.29 For Bonnard and his fellow Nabis, the
arabesque provided the means of achieving expressive and harmoni-
ous compositions by uniting the different elements in a composition
and flattening it, so that the relationships between objects, the text
(if any), and the picture plane as a whole took precedence over the
description of the objects themselves.
The versatile concept of the arabesque as defined by Symbolist
poets, artists and musicians is linked to the idea of a unified theory of
the arts, an issue widely debated throughout much of the nineteenth
century. The Symbolist writer Charles Morice, for instance, sought
a synthesis of all the arts in each of the arts.30 Of course, Morice’s
sentiments express a universal philosophy of art based upon the idea
28 Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 98.
29 Maurice J. E. Brown, “Arabesque,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London and Washington, D. C.: Grove’s Dictionary
of Music, 1987), 1:512-13.
30 For an excellent discussion of the importance of Morice’s book, La litté-
rature de tout à l’heur (published 1889), for the Symbolist movement see André
 33

of correspondences, which had strongly interested the poet Baude-

laire. The theory holds that certain qualities of one medium evoke
equivalent qualities in another and any and all of them, affecting us
through the five senses, ultimately attains the universal. This phe-
nomenon is synesthesia. Surely, the potential of an image to arouse
something of the saporous and redolent sensations promised by the
product advertised is something that Bonnard must have thought
useful in France-Champagne: The lemony yellow evokes something
of the tart palette and aroma of the champagne, the intoxicating ef-
fects and the sprightly froth of the bubbles felt in the dizzying line
and briskly applied curls of black ink.
Of all its innovative features, Bonnard’s poster is unprecedented
in its harmonization of the lettering into the overall design. Sweep-
ing crescent curves of the “F” and “C” echo the woman’s graceful
outline denoting the shape and gesture of her right arm. The woman,
like the text above, is handled calligraphically: the push and pull of
the brush, the amount of pressure exerted on its tip determining the
tenor, shape and texture of their lines. To further reinforce the text/
image relationship, Bonnard avoided perspective and modeling,
fixing all elements to the picture plane. Simplicity and directness
was Bonnard’s aim. “We put too much detail in our compositions,”
Bonnard said to Sainte-Clair, critic for La Plume: “We must react: a
blank sheet, a quick sketch, the text.”31
Bonnard’s unique treatment of the text and image in this man-
ner, by hand drawing both, owes much to the relationship between
painting and calligraphy in Japan, a topic that was widely discussed
among Western artists and art critics in the 1880s.32 In 1887, for
example, Ernest Fenollosa wrote in some detail about the ways in
which the Chinese and Japanese styles of writing were transmit-

Fontainas, Mes Souvenirs du Symbolisme (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1928),

25-45.
31 Claire Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard,
and Their Circle, Translated by Mary Pardoe (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991),
225.
32 For an excellent discussion of the relationship between words and images
in Japan see, Christine Guth, Asobi: Play in the Arts of Japan (New York: Katonah
Museum of Art, 1992), 28-41.
34 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

ted into the visual arts.33 And in his highly respected and exhaus-
tive study, The Pictorial Arts of Japan (1886), the English scholar,
William Anderson, examined to a great extent the history and
techniques of calligraphy and the relationship between writing and
drawing in Japan. Anderson illustrated a total of ten different callig-
raphy styles appropriated by Asian artists for various subjects or for
different objects within a single painting.
One figure Anderson included in his text shows the extreme de-
gree to which the relationship between writing and drawing exists
in Japan. Anderson simply entitled this image “Calligraphic figure.
From an old engraving” and dated it to around 1720. Beneath the
engraving he placed the caption: “All the lines of the drapery are
comprised in the characters written above the figure.”34 This illus-
tration is a moji-e, or “word-picture”, a genre of painting and print-
making that originated in the Heian period (794-1185) and became
widely popular in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies when they were published in large numbers.35 These images,
meant to appeal to an increasingly literate Japanese population, are
visual rebuses composed of written and drawn elements from which
the reader/viewer is challenged to piece together coherent words or
phrases hidden within the verbal and visual clues.36 In the example
illustrated by Anderson, a courtesan wearing an elaborate kimono
and holding a closed fan turns to look coyly over her left shoulder.
Her costume is comprised of a dramatic flourish of calligraphic
strokes within which one can detect the kanji characters for moon
and wind that when combined refer to the domain of the courtesan,
the floating world of earthly pleasures available in the entertainment
districts of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka.37 In another, well known, exam-
ple attributed to Iwasa Matabei a stylized figure of a hunched man

33 Ernest Fenollosa, “Pictorial Art of Japan,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

141 (1887): 282.
34 William Anderson, The Pictorial Arts of Japan (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1886), 200, fig. 96.
35 The rise in popularity of this genre was partly due to the importance of lit-
eracy among the educated classes; Guth, Asobi, 29.
36 Guth, Asobi, 29.
37 Professor Kirk Wang of Eckerd College kindly provided this reading.
 35

leans on a thin cane. His form is rendered in hiragana script with the
phonetic syllables for beggar (tsu na ichi). Adjacent to this figure
is one of a samurai whose flowing robes comprise the syllables for
the phrase “I humbly thank [you]” (orei o moshi soro).38 The literal
fusion of word and image via calligraphic line in these pictures may
have served as the model Bonnard used to solve his problem of relat-
ing text and image in a meaningful way in his poster. And given the
extraordinary stylistic and thematic similarities—a woman associ-
ated with earthly, sensual pleasures—between Bonnard’s poster and
the courtesan illustrated in Anderson’s book, one has to wonder if
Bonnard may have actually seen this moji-e or others like it.
About the same time that Bonnard was finishing work on his
poster he undertook the production of a series of illustrations for
his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse’s primer of music theory for
children, Petit solfège illustré (A solfège is a child’s beginning music
book, explaining notes, scales, keys, rhythm and other simple nota-
tional terms). These illustrations are yet another example from this
period of the artist working on the problem of a synthesis between
text and image. According to Helen Giambruni, Bonnard’s draw-
ings for this music book are unique, having no real precedents in
earlier illustration in the West.39 She notes, however, that his work is
remarkably close in spirit to the caricature-like drawings of Hokusai,
with their flowing arabesque lines and feeling for playful exaggera-
tion in expression and gesture.40
Bonnard’s task here was to make the music lessons agreeable, if
not fun and amusing, for its youthful audience—a problem com-
pounded by Terrasse’s rather dry and undistinguished expository
style. In a letter to Edouard Vuillard mailed from the Villa Bach
(a property the Terrasses rented at Arcachon) on April 15, 1891,
Bonnard reveals his sources of inspiration as well as a little of his
anxiety about the undertaking: “I don’t know how I’m going to pull
something out for my Solfège. I’ll have to think of the old-time mis-
38 Guth, Asobi, 28-30.
39 Helen Giambruni, “Domestic Scenes,” in Colta Feller Ives, Helen Giam-
bruni, Sasha M. Newman, Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art (New York: The Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 52.
40 Helen Giambruni, “Domestic Scenes,” 53.
36 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

sal decorators or of the Japanese putting art into encyclopedic dic-

tionaries to give me courage.”41 Bonnard, it seems, found Hokusai’s
animated drawings to be good models by which to bring together
his illustrations, the dry music theory, and the accompanying musi-
cal scores and notations. For example, to demonstrate the various
shapes and values of notes and their durations he superimposed a
large whole note over a rotund lady, used a woman half her girth for
the half note, and for quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second
notes he used tall thin waif-like women in black gowns and with
flowing locks of hair to mimic the forms of musical notation. In the
following lesson, Bonnard used these caricatures again to illustrate
measure by filling a box with a corpulent grandame (the whole note
that comprises the four-beat measure), then following with another
measure of two quarter notes and a half note represented by two
skinny ladies and a plump woman, and a final four-beat measure
of three demoiselles accompanied by two young girls—three quar-
ters and two eighths.42 And for the lesson on syncopation, Bonnard
strung a line of leaping and lunging dogs across the top of the page:
the bounding dog indicates the last beat in the first measure merging
with the first beat of the next. The undulating placement of the dog’s
heads and tails as well as the dynamic arched and curved black lines
describing the dog’s backs and bellies were ingeniously arranged so
as to move the eye from left to right in harmony and rhythm with
the notes and tie bars in the musical score below.43 In all of his il-
lustrations for the primer, Bonnard strove to find the perfect visual
equivalents for the abstract musical notations and the ideas found
in Terrasse’s lessons. As with his France-Champagne, he found that
Japanese calligraphy with its flowing arabesque line offered the best
solution to this particular problem. Undoubtedly, the arabesque’s
musical associations made the form all the more appropriate for Ter-
rasse’s primer.
Clearly, Japonisme was the major impetus behind the emergence
of the modern poster in 1891. As part of their initiative to invigorate

41 Helen Giambruni, “Domestic Scenes,” 56.

42 Helen Giambruni, “Domestic Scenes,” 58.
43 Helen Giambruni, “Domestic Scenes,” 58.
 37

Western fine and decorative arts, influential Japonists and members

of the artistic community in France used Japanese art as the basis
upon which to reform the decorative and fine arts as well as refor-
mulate poster aesthetics and function. The first artist to successfully
combine all of the ingredients of the new modern poster was Pierre
Bonnard, whose love of Japanese art and special circumstances as a
member of the Nabis provided him with the additional motivation
and significant theoretical justification for his innovative design.
Despite the overwhelming success of France-Champagne, Bon-
nard created only nine other posters. The most important of these
were La Revue Blanche (1894) and Le Salon des Cent (1896). Bon-
nard was so fond of these posters that he included them with his
paintings in his first one-man show at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in
January 1896. As in France-Champagne, Bonnard used a simple and
concise design and took care to harmonize the textual and figural
elements.
Bonnard’s legacy in poster design can be found in the work of
Toulouse-Lautrec who was inspired by France-Champagne to try
his hand at chromolithography.44 Thadée Natanson, who knew
both Bonnard and Lautrec very well, recalled how Lautrec spied
France-Champagne on the street, was “bowled over” by its inven-
tiveness and then, with the tenacity characteristic of him, did not
rest until he had managed to locate its author.45 Not long thereafter
Bonnard introduced Lautrec to his printer, Ancourt, whose shop
published Lautrec’s first important poster, La Goulue au Moulin
Rouge (Figure 5), thereby launching the graphic career of an artist
with whom Bonnard would often be in contact during the 1890s
on commissions to create posters, book covers, theater programs,
color prints and magazine illustrations. For as prolific and varied an
artist as Lautrec was, he is perhaps best known for his posters, the
Japanese qualities of which are pronounced: flat, bright colors, ag-
gressive line, asymmetrical compositions with skewed perspectives,
and textual elements that complement the design. Even Jules Chéret

44 Thadée Natanson, “Bonnard,” Peints à leur tour (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948),
319.
45 Natanson, “Bonnard,” 319.
38 Japan Studies Association Journal 2008

eventually followed Bonnard’s example and began producing poster

designs that use some Japanese aesthetic devices. Though, today,
France-Champagne may look less revolutionary after more than a
century of familiarity with modern examples by Toulouse-Lautrec
and later twentieth-century designers, Bonnard’s poster is important
for having been the first.

Figure 5.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue au Moulin Rouge, 1891. Musée des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

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