Japonisme

Japonisme is what Europe took from Japanese prints in the 1870s and 1880s: flatness, cropping and empty space, applied to Western subjects. On a poster it gives calm and elegance without any ornament.

The asymmetry is the part that still surprises. Most posters balance. This one puts the weight in one corner and leaves the rest of the sheet alone.

Look down on the scene rather than straight at it. A high oblique viewpoint removes the horizon and flattens everything.

Colour goes on flat, inside a fine dark contour, with no modelling. Two or three colours plus the paper.

Crop hard: a branch, a fan or a parasol enters from one edge and leaves at another. Add a small red seal block and set the title as brushed characters or drawn lettering down one edge.

Use it for a tea event, a garden opening, a recital, a craft exhibition, a restaurant, anything that wants calm and taste.

Leave it alone for a loud event. It has almost no contrast and nothing to shout with.

Ukiyo-e is the Japanese original, with Japanese subjects, woodblock grain and keyblock outlines. Japonisme is the European borrowing, with Western subjects.

Art Nouveau grew out of Japonisme and added the whiplash curve and the figure. If the stems are curling, you have moved on.

Japanese minimal poster is the modern descendant and drops the pattern entirely.

Whistler built whole rooms out of it, notably the Peacock Room in 1877. Toulouse-Lautrec learned the flat colour and the hard crop from Japanese prints and used both in his Moulin Rouge bills, and Liberty of London sold the taste to everybody else.

The model returns a Japanese woodblock print. Say Western subject arranged in the Japanese manner, flat colour and hard cropping, not a ukiyo-e scene.

The second failure is a balanced composition. Ask for strong asymmetry with a large empty area on one side.