Japan's impact 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 Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork and architecture, as well as printmaking and painting, reached the West and brought electrifying new ideas on composition, colour and design. This is a study of how Japanese ideas have inspired artists such as Monet, Degas, Whistler and Van Gogh. 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.