AMSTERDAM — In the soft, clear light of Provence, France, Vincent van Gogh saw the crisp skies of Japanese woodcut prints. The almond blossoms, gnarled trees and irises that dotted the French landscape reminded him of nature scenes painted in Kyoto. And in the locals at Arles cafes, he saw resonances with the geishas and Kabuki actors of a country he had never visited.

阿姆斯特丹——在法国普罗旺斯柔和清晰的阳光下，文森特.梵高(Vincent van Gogh)看到了日本木刻版画中的清澈天空。法国风光里的杏花、鸢尾花与盘根错节的树木让他联想起那些在京都绘制的自然风景。在阿尔咖啡馆的当地人身上，他看到日本艺妓与歌舞伎的影子，而那是一个他从未去过的国家。

“My dear brother, you know, I feel I’m in Japan,” van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, on March 16, 1888, not long after he had settled in Arles.

“亲爱的弟弟，你知道，我觉得自己好像在日本，”1888年3月16日，梵高在定居阿尔不久后写信给弟弟提奥(Theo)。

By June he was urging Theo and other Impressionist artists in Paris to join him. “I’d like you to spend some time here, you’d feel it,” he wrote. “After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel color differently.”

到六月份，他开始敦促提奥和巴黎其他印象派艺术家加入自己的行列。“我希望你能在这里度过一段时间，你会感觉到的，”他写道。“一段时间后，你的视野会发生变化，你会更多地以日本人的方式去观察事物，以不同的方式去感知色彩。”

For at least a year, van Gogh, who was Dutch, lived in Provence in a kind of Japanese dream. It was not a delusion, but rather an imaginative projection of an idealized vision of Japan onto the French landscape, said Nienke Bakker, curator of paintings for the Van Gogh Museum. The painter had been bitten by the bug of Japonisme, a mania for Japanese aesthetics that swept Europe in the 19th century, and which also afflicted painters such as Claude Monet, ?douard Manet and Edgar Degas.

在至少一年的时间里，荷兰人梵高在普罗旺斯做着他的日本梦。梵高博物馆馆长尼恩克.巴克(Nienke Bakker)说，这不是妄想，而是把他心目中理想化的日本景观投射到法国风景当中去，非常有想象力。19世纪，对日本美学的狂热席卷欧洲，被称为“日本主义”，梵高也受到了冲击，这股风潮还感染了克劳德·莫奈(Claude Monet)，爱德华·马奈(?douard Manet )和埃德加·德加(Edgar Degas)等画家。

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in collaboration with three Japanese museums, has mounted the most comprehensive exhibition so far to explore that inspiration, “Van Gogh & Japan,” which runs through June 24. It tracks van Gogh’s early fascination with imported Japanese Ukiyo-e prints — colorful woodblock prints on handmade paper that were popular in Europe in the late 19th century. It also shows how, little by little, van Gogh integrated elements of Japanese art into his own style.

阿姆斯特丹的梵高博物馆与三家日本博物馆合作举办了“梵高与日本”(Van Gogh & Japan)展览，迄今最全面地探索了梵高从日本主义中所获得的灵感，展览将持续至6月24日。它追溯了梵高早年对出口到欧洲的日本浮世绘的迷恋——浮世绘是一种印在手工纸张上的彩色木版画，于19世纪末开始在欧洲流行。该展览也显示出梵高如何将日本艺术元素逐渐融入自己的风格。

“It’s hard to imagine what his works would have looked like without this source of inspiration,” said Bakker, one of the exhibition’s four curators, referring to the influence of Japanese prints. “It really helped him to find the style that we all know,” she added. “He really chose that as the way to go.”

“很难想象，如果没有这种灵感的启发，他的作品会是什么样子，”该展览的四位策展人之一巴克(Bakker)这样评价日本版画的影响。“它确实帮助他找到了他那种众所周知的风格，”她补充说。“他确实选择了这种方式作为自己的方向。”

The sprawling exhibition — which is larger than a previous version that toured Tokyo, Sapporo and Kyoto — includes nearly all the major van Gogh paintings that make direct or indirect reference to Japanese art. These are hung near some 50 Japanese prints that played a role in the development of van Gogh’s distinctive style, as well as Japanese lacquerwork and painted scrolls.

这场展览的规模很大，超过之前在东京、札幌和京都的巡展，囊括了梵高几乎所有直接或间接参考日本艺术的重要绘画作品。一同展出的还有约50幅日本版画，它们在梵高独特风格的发展中扮演了重要角色，此外还有一些日本漆器和绘画卷轴。

Van Gogh first encountered Japanese prints in 1885 while working in Antwerp, the Belgian port city, whose docks he described as teeming with Japanese wares: They were “fantastic, singular, strange,” he wrote.

梵高初次接触日本版画是1885年在比利时港口城市安特卫普工作期间，据他描述，那里的码头上有许多日本器物：它们“美好、奇异、古怪”，他写道。

The Van Gogh Museum exhibition begins about a year later, when he moved into his brother’s apartment in Paris and discovered that the German art dealer Siegfried Bing, who sold Japanese art and decorative objects, had an attic full of Japanese woodcut prints at reasonable prices.

梵高博物馆此次展览的展品大约始于一年之后，当时梵高搬到了弟弟在巴黎的公寓，认识了出售日本艺术品与装饰品的德国艺术经销商齐格弗里德.宾(Siegfried Bing)，他的阁楼里塞满了价格公道的日本木刻版画。

He immediately bought about 660 prints for just a few cents a piece. Bakker said that van Gogh originally held an exhibition trying to resell the prints, but it was unsuccessful. So instead he tacked them to his studio walls and used them for inspiration. About 500 survive in the Van Gogh Museum’s permanent collection.

他很快以几分钱一张的价格购买了大约660幅版画。巴克说，一开始，梵高举办了一次展览，试图转售这些版画，但没有成功。于是他就把它们挂在自己工作室的墙上，从中获得灵感。其中约500张流传至今，成为梵高博物馆的永久收藏。

By the time van Gogh moved to Arles a year later, he was fully in the thrall of Japan. On the train from Paris, he repeatedly checked out the window, he wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, “to see ‘if it was like Japan yet’! Childish, isn’t it?’”

一年后，梵高搬到阿尔，那时他已彻底迷上了日本。他写信给朋友保罗.高更(Paul Gauguin)说，在从巴黎出发的火车上，他反复查看窗外，“看看‘是不是已经有点像日本了’！孩子气，对不对？”

“The first year in Arles, everything is Japan,” Bakker said. “Later, after his breakdown, that changes, and he still refers to it but it’s less important. The nature of his admiration had changed. It has become integrated into his style, but it’s no longer his artistic model.”

“在阿尔的第一年，一切都和日本有关，”巴克说。“后来，在他崩溃之后，这种情况发生了变化，他仍然提到日本，但它已经变得不那么重要。他欣赏的性质变了。它融入了他的风格，但已不再是他的艺术模板。”

The impact was more subtle, more buried in his technique. For instance, he sometimes divided the canvas using diagonal lines, rather than using horizontal perspective planes, as was the norm in Western painting. And he would streak his paintings with diagonal rain, as he had seen in Japanese prints.

这种影响更加微妙，在他的技巧中变得更加隐蔽。比如，他有时使用对角线的方式划分画布，而不是像西方绘画中经常使用的那样使用水平透视平面。他让大量斜线布满画面，就像他在日本版画中看到的那样。

The Japanese dream had ended, perhaps, but the fascination with Japan had not. Tsukasa Kodera, a Japanese curator who worked on the exhibition, has studied van Gogh’s interest in his country for more than 30 years, and spent the past six researching the final phase of van Gogh’s life.

也许日本梦已经做完了，但他对日本的迷恋并没有结束。这个展览的日本策展人圀府寺司(Tsukasa Kodera)30年来一直在研究梵高对日本的兴趣，过去六年中，他研究了梵高生命的最后阶段。

“He was interested in our culture, and that says something to Japanese people,” Kodera said. Even though van Gogh’s art was not widely reproduced and accessible in Japan until decades later, he added: “They had also van Gogh visions, van Gogh dreams. Just as van Gogh imagined Japan as a country, they imagined him. It was a kind of two-way imaginary vision.”

“他对我们的文化感兴趣，这对日本人来说很有意义，”圀府寺司说。尽管梵高的艺术直到几十年后才开始在日本被广泛复制和观赏，但他说：“日本人也同样拥有梵高的视野与梵高的梦想。正如梵高想象日本这个国家，日本人也在想象梵高。这是一种双向的想象视野。”

（来源：爱语吧）