Monday after class.

We were put into pairs to answer each others questions for our after class blog, Laura was my partner and her question was what was the Asian spell? (page 195).

In the book it says important inspiration also came from European painting in the late 1880's, which had fallen under the Asian spell. the swirling forms of Vincent Van Gogh, the flat color and stylized organic contour of Paul Gauguin and the work of the Nabis group of young artists all played a role.

After looking up information about the Asian spell online, I feel like they were controlled by the government.  

"It is said that James Whistler discovered Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom near London Bridge and that Claude Monet first came upon them used as wrapping paper in a spice shop in Holland. James Tissot and his friend Edgar Degas were among the earliest collectors of Japanese art in France, but their own art was affected by exotic things in very different ways. Unlike Tissot, and others who came under the spell of Japan, Degas avoided staging japoneries that featured models dressed in kimonos and the conspicuous display of oriental props. Instead, he absorbed qualities of the Japanese aesthetic that he found most sympathetic: elongated pictorial formats, asymmetrical compositions, aerial perspective, spaces emptied of all but abstract elements of color and line, and a focus on singularly decorative motifs. In the process, he redoubled his originality. "
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jpon/hd_jpon.htm