The Influence of Japanese Art on Design
Hannah Sigur
This stunning book explores the story of Japan as the catalyst of modern design in the Gilded Age. Author Hannah Sigur juxtaposes glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese materials ranging from one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera, showing the ways that Japanese arts and ideas about Japan changed the world.
The "Japan Craze" came at a time of radical change in society. Western culture was yearning for the values of a past it believed were embodied in Japanese traditional arts, and Japan felt the demand for modernity it saw embodied in the West. During this time, both traditional arts and modern manufactures from Japan became the focus of an international coterie of artists, dealers, and thinkers who proselytized Japanese aesthetics as a model.
In elegant prose and with more than 200 photographs in this beautifully illustrated book, Hannah Sigur examines motifs, materials, and methods of the influence of Japanese art on design, and follows the transformation from traditionalism into modernism that marked the developments from the Aesthetic movement into Arts and Crafts and finally to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing how that model transformed design and concept.
Hannah Sigur is an art historian and writer on the arts of Japan with seven years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. An adjunct professor, she teaches a wide range of courses at San Francisco State University, University of California-Davis, and elsewhere, and has lectured at major museums and antiques fairs across the country from NewYork to California, on Asian arts, American decorative arts, and contemporary floral design.
Her writings include co-authoring A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (Timber Press, 2002), which is listed in "The Best Books of 2002" by The Christian Science Monitor. She lives in Berkeley with her husband.
Jacket design by Ron Stucki
Jacket photograph 2008 Cohen Bray House


During America's Gilded Age (dates), the country was swept by a mania for all things Japanese. It spread from coast to coast, enticed everyone from robber barons to street vendors with its allure, and touched every aspect of life from patent medicines to wallpaper. Americans of the time found in Japanese art every design language: modernism or tradition, abstraction or realism, technical virtuosity or unfettered naturalism, craft or art, romance or functionalism. The art of Japan had a huge influence on American art and design. Title compares juxtapositions of American glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese material ranging from expensive one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera. Beginning in the Aesthetic movement, this book continues through the Arts & Crafts era and ends in Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing the reader how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept.