Japonisme

Chelsey Laughlin

Professor Rebecca Weller

Art 483

22 May 2013

Japonisme

Japonisme and the femme fatale were very influential movements, both influenced art to be what it is today. In this paper, I will discuss how different works of art each influenced this movement differently. Works of art such as Gustav Klimt’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Aubrey Beardsley’s Salome (the peacock skirt), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Reine de Joie each have its own individuality and elements. The femme fatale was about the new woman whose beauty was a strong as she was fierce and independent. Japonisme was part of the foundation for modernism while using some ideas from the French such as the long scrolls and the symmetry. I will discuss how Japonisme and the femme fatale are influenced by artists such as Klimt, Beardsley, and Toulousse.

The femme fatale is women whose beauty is just as dangerous to the man as she is to the man’s eyes. Virginia Allen, the author of The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon states that “women adopted the appearance and demeanor of the femme fatale without necessarily adopting the lethal attitude. They were aspiring as much to the icon’s independence as to her erotic power. She offered one of the few role models with women in the nineteenth century” (191). The women of the femme fatale in the nineteenth century were a prominent role model to the women and men. The woman became even more admirable because she did not show signs of an attitude with her beauty. The men wanted to be with her, and the women wanted to be her, this is what made her so powerful. The women in the nineteenth century did not have very many people to aspire to be because it was a male dominated time, so when the women of the femme fatale became popular, it was intriguing to the women to finally be able to want to be someone. Allen also mentions that the women of the femme fatale “were produced by men who felt threatened by the escape of some actual women from male...