Japan on Louisiana (1974)

Exhibition poster from Louisiana's exhibition, Japan at Louisiana, in 1974. With over 200 different works by 37 contemporary Japanese artists, Louisiana's exhibition of modern Japanese art was by far the largest outside of Japan at the time of the exhibition in 1974.

Of all foreign cultures, the Japanese one is probably the one that has had the most profound impact on the sensibility of the Western world for more than a hundred years, says Louisiana Revy in a foreword to the exhibition.

Japanese woodcuts influenced European painting with their flat painting and bold cuts of the motif, and the ink art of Zen art influenced American and European art in the 1950s and 1960s.

Modern architects in the West are indebted to their Japanese colleagues, whose sense of materials, intimacy and human proportions fascinated and were incorporated. For example, the Japanese modular system, which several of Louisiana's own buildings also express – a line of thinking that was fully developed by architects of the Bauhaus generation in particular.

And the influence and inspiration went both ways. Both European painters and architects sent strong influences back to Japanese painting and architecture. In the same way, experiences were exchanged between Japanese and European crafts, from the French Art Deco of the 1920s to the Finnish industrial arts of the 1950s.