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Gallery 208, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. In this room hangs Claude Monet's 1876 painting La Japonaise. Contrary to its title, there is no Japanese woman in it: the painting depicts Camille Monet, the painter's wife, wearing a sumptuous kimono. She's twisted toward the viewer/portraitist in a classic feminine pose, cribbed from the Japanese ukiyo-e prints so popular in France at that moment, holding up a Japanese-style folding fan in blue, white and red (the colours of the French tricolour flag) in front of a backdrop featuring many more Japanese fans. The gallery guide informs us that the ‘naturally dark-haired’ Camille is also wearing a blonde wig, ‘to emphasize her Western identity’. In effect, the painting reflects the height of Japonisme in nineteenth-century France, so excessively that some critics claim it was meant as a parody of the French obsession with Japan.1 Turned in two directions, Camille faces back toward the future viewer, or the former artist, poised at the apex of a craze, smiling with equanimity at both her husband, the artist who will later disavow his work as une saleté (‘a piece of filth’) and at generations of gallery visitors. By summer 2015, Camille's painted image was smiling down at an unruly crowd – some of whom were precisely copying her pose and affect in a replica of her red kimono, while others were vigorously denouncing the painting, the re-enactors and the museum that housed them all.2
La Japonaise’s latest controversy began on 24 June 2015, the first night of the MFA's summer programme, Kimono Wednesdays. Visitors on open-late, pay-what-you-can Wednesdays were invited to try on replicas of the kimono Camille wears in La Japonaise and listen to a short gallery talk entitled ‘Claude Monet: Flirting with the Exotic’.3 In addition to patrons trying on the heavily embroidered and padded kimono and posing for pictures, three protesters stationed themselves in the gallery, holding hand-lettered signs made of plain printer paper with messages about orientalism, exotification and racism. That first Kimono Wednesday coincided with the retirement festivities of the museum director, Malcolm Rogers, who, when asked by a Boston Globe reporter about the protesters, declared, ‘a little controversy never did any harm’.4
Over the next two...