Monet and Ukiyo-e: The Japanese Beauty That Captivated Monet

Monet and Ukiyo-e is an immersive programme at THE MOVEUM YOKOHAMA, a digital art venue run by the Toyota Group in Shed No. 4, a former warehouse of about 6,000 square metres on Yamashita Pier in Yokohama. It presents the art of Claude Monet through his ties with Japanese art, and follows how ukiyo-e, the woodblock prints of the Edo period, opened new ways of seeing to Western painters in the late nineteenth century.

The theatre

In the main theatre, a space of about 1,800 square metres, paintings, architecture, music, film and sound are joined into one continuous show of about 45 minutes, which runs on a loop. Visitors can sit and watch or walk through the projections. The creative director is Gianfranco Iannuzzi, who has made immersive art for more than 30 years.

The show begins in Paris in the late nineteenth century, when Monet, Renoir and Degas turned from history and myth to the life of their own time, and Japan, newly open to the world, was sending prints and crafts to Europe. It moves on to nature, the subject Monet painted all his life, and then to Japonisme. Prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige appear for the bold compositions and flattened depth that struck Western artists.

The show ends at Giverny, where Monet laid out a garden with a Japanese-style bridge and a water lily pond, the subjects of his Water Lilies series. He was a keen collector of ukiyo-e, and his house there held more than 200 prints, among them works by Hokusai.

Beyond the theatre

Two smaller rooms go with the show. One is modelled on the dining room of Monet's house at Giverny, where he hung prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro; it lies at the far end of the main hall. The other is an ukiyo-e gallery on the craftsmen who made the prints and the life of Edo they record.

The Pola Museum of Art advised on the content, and the programme has the support of the French Embassy in Japan and the Institut français.