Insect Biodiversity in Meiji and Art Nouveau Design

Abstract

Diverse insects, from butterflies to cicadas, have remained a consistent presence in the art of East Asia for millennia (Berenbaum 1995). In Europe, this has not always been the case—insects made occasional appearances in medieval manuscripts, usually as marginalia (Neri 2011, Nazari 2014); later, the Age of Exploration and the Linnaean era increased the prevalence of insects in scientific illustration, but insects actually became less popular in European fine arts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (Dicke 2000, Floyd 2009, Neri 2011). This trend in European art was quickly reversed before the turn of the twentieth century, when Japanese appreciation of insects reached Europe. In 1853, Japanese ports opened to the West; in 1868, the Japanese shogunate ended, and the new Meiji government came into power (Buruma 2004). The Meiji Restoration turned Japan, which had been a highly insular culture, to the West (Buruma 2004). The Meiji government established a European-style educational system with a particular emphasis on science and technology (Nakayama 1989). “Driven largely by the desire to avoid the colonization by Western nations witnessed in other parts of East Asia, a full-scale campaign on national self-definition and modernization, which in many ways looked like Westernization, was underway in Japan” (Saunders 2010). As Japan imported European ideas, Japanese art was exported to eager audiences in Europe (Weisberg 1975). The Japanese canon, comprised of works by masters such as Katsushika Hokusai, exerted a tremendous influence on European artists such as Edouard Manet, James Whistler, and Claude Monet (Weisberg 1975, Watanabe 1984, Inaga 2003, Ono 2003). Simultaneously, Western entomologists collected insects …