Orientalism in the European art of the XVIII - early XX centuries

The article examines the main stages of intercultural communication between East and West, analyzes the reasons for the emergence of interest in Eastern themes and motives in Europe. The beginning of the article is devoted to the history of the formation of the terms “East” and “West”, the semantic instability of the first of them is noted, since different countries and regions were included in it at different periods. The author emphasizes that the interest in the East among Europeans is characterized by undulation. If at the early stages Europe was mainly in contact with Chinese works of art, which led to the formation of the Chinoiserie style in the context of the rocaille tradition, then in the 1850s - 1880s the features of the language of Japanese art became a reference point for European masters. The artistic impact of engravings and decorative and applied products from Japan on Western painters was so great that it became necessary to consider it as one of the phenomena of the European art space in the last third of the ХIХ century and to introduce a special designation for it - Japanism. The author comes to the conclusion that the intercultural contacts of the West and the East should be considered in retrospect, which reveals their dynamics: from the West’s perception of the East initially as an integral territory, which is interesting for its exoticism, as an extra-European world in need of missionary guidance, to the allocation of separate parts and countries in this region (Africa, Polynesia, China Japan, etc.), each of which has a certain set of artistic traditions, its own language of art.