“ KIMONO - Reflections of art between Japan and the West ” is the title of the new exhibition organized by the Prato Textile Museum which has obtained the prestigious patronage of the Japanese Embassy in Italy, running from 29 April until 19 November 2023.

The exhibition explores the creative and cultural contaminations - which occurred between Europe and Japan mainly from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century - through the display of a careful selection of works that bear witness to the fundamental steps of those mutual influences.

Alongside the already well-known phenomenon of Japonism, i.e. the way in which European art of that period transposed and reinterpreted the expressive and decorative language of Japanese art, the exhibition focuses above all on illustrating the opposite process, defined by some as Occidentalism , in which even the most iconic object of the culture of the Rising Sun, the kimono, is influenced by Western culture and figurative art.

On display are a series of paintings, woodcuts, vintage postcards, prints and fabrics from both important private collections and unpublished collections of the Museum, but above all the fifty male and female kimonos belonging to the exclusive private collection of Lydia Manavello, all datable to the first and second quarter of the twentieth century, made of woven, embroidered or printed silk. This extraordinary collection of works testifies with variety and liveliness to the extraordinary artistic and stylistic contaminations that occurred in those decades between East and West, with particular reference to the formal innovations of the European avant-gardes such as Futurism, Secession and Cubism which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, profoundly modified the Japanese traditional decorative language.