Survival Boogie Woogie. Neo-Japonisme, Architectural Photography & Abstraction - by Jean-Sébastien Cluzel (Hardcover)

About the Book

What links are there between Piet Mondrian's unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie and post-war Japanese and Japanese-style architectural photography? This book examines the works of Japanese and American architectural photographers in an effort to interpret how the world of architecture was Japanized between 1945 and 1985.

Book Synopsis

What links are there between Piet Mondrian's unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-4) and post-war Japanese and Japanese-style architectural photography? As far back as the mid-1950s, critics and photographers were inclined to link Mondrian's painting with modern Japanese architecture and some historians were to go so far as to assert that Mondrian himself had been influenced by traditional Japanese architecture.Powerful associations such as these contributed to the coming together of Western and Japanese architectural modernity. They also underpinned the survival of Japonisme in architecture, or put another way, of the neo-Japonisme that emerged after the Second World War. However, while this kinship between Mondrian's abstraction and the aesthetic of Japanese architecture is little apparent in architecture, it does show in architectural photography. This book, which takes a sidelong look at Mondrian, examines the works of the foremost among Japanese and American architectural photographers in an effort to interpret the dynamics of how the world of architecture was Japanized between 1945 and 1985.

About the Author

Jean Sébastien Cluzel is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Sorbonne University, as well as an archaeologist and architect specializing in the history of Japanese architecture.