French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series: Jean-Sebastien Cluzel (Sorbonne University)

The Department of Art History is pleased to present the next installment of our French Visiting Lecture Series, featuring Jean-Sebastien Cluzel.

Japanism in Modern Architecture: Who Spoke about Boogie Woogie?

PLEASE NOTE: Registration Required

What links are there between Piet Mondrian’s unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–4) and post-war Japanese and Japanese-style architectural photography?  As far back as the mid-1950s, critics and photographers were inclined to link Mondrian’s painting with modern Japanese architecture and some historians were to go so far as to assert that Mondrian himself had been influenced by traditional Japanese architecture. These powerful associations contributed to the convergence of Western and Japanese architectural modernity. They also underpinned the survival of Japonisme in architecture, or put another way, of the neo-Japonisme that emerged after the Second World War. However, while this kinship between Mondrian’s abstraction and the aesthetic of Japanese architecture is little apparent in architecture, it does show in architectural photography. This talk, which takes an oblique look at Mondrian, examines the works of the foremost among Japanese and American architectural photographers to interpret the dynamics of how the world of architecture was Japanized between 1945 and 1985.

Archaeologist and architect, Jean-Sébastien Cluzel is director of the André-Chastel Research Centre and a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Sorbonne University, where he teaches the history of art and the archaeology of Asia. Specializing in the history of Japanese architecture, he has been responsible for the restoration of the Japanese pavilion in the Albert-Kahn garden in Boulogne-Billancourt, the expertise of the Stork room for the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, and he is associated as an expert in the restoration project of the movie theater La Pagode in Paris. His books include: Architecture éternelle du Japon .De l’histoire aux mythes (Dijon, Faton, 2008) ; Hokusai. Le vieux fou d’architecture (Paris, Seuil-BnF, 2014) ; Le sanctuaire d’Ise. Récit de la 62e reconstruction (Bruxelles, Mardaga, 2015); And in English: Japonisme and Architecture in France. 1550-1930 (Dijon, Faton, 2022); Survival Boogie Woogie. Neo-Japonisme, Architectural Photography & Abstraction, 1945-1985 (Brill-Scala 2024).