The impact of Japan on Western art was as immediate and almost as cataclysmic as the influence of the West on Japanese life. After Commodore Perry opened Japan’s door to the outside world in 1858, a wealth of visual information from the superb Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork, architecture, print-making and painting reached the West and brought with it electrifying new ideas of composition, colour and design. One has only to see a celebrated painting by Monet, Degas or Van Gogh, a print by Lautrec or Vallotton, an Art Nouveau glass vase or a lacquered hair comb side by side with its Japanese source to see how these ideas have inspired European artists. Japanese conventions of symbolism underlie the use of decorative motifs in European Symbolism and Art Nouveau, and the Zen idea of spontaneity is the ultimate source of both the apparently capricious shapes of Art Nouveau ware and the development of an abstract ‘calligraphy’ in Abstract Expressionism.