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Renegade Edo and Paris



SKU:
9780932216076
  • Renegade Edo and Paris
  • Renegade Edo and Paris
  • Renegade Edo and Paris
  • Renegade Edo and Paris
  • Renegade Edo and Paris
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Description

A critical look at the renegade spirit that permeates Japanese prints and the posters of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Both the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan and the late nineteenth century in France witnessed a multitude of challenges to the status quo from the rising middle class. In Edo (present-day Tokyo), townspeople pursued hedonistic lifestyles as a way of defying the state-sanctioned social hierarchy that positioned them at the bottom. Their new pastimes supplied subject matter for ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world). Many such pictures arrived in France in the 1860s, a time when French art and society were undergoing substantial changes. Fin-de-siècle Paris, like Edo before it, saw the rise of antiestablishment attitudes and a Bohemian subculture. As artists searched for fresh and more expressive forms, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and his contemporaries were drawn to novel Japanese prints.

While ukiyo-e's formal influences on Toulouse-Lautrec and his peers have been well studied, the shared subversive hedonism that underlies these artworks has been less examined. Through a wide selection of Japanese prints and Toulouse-Lautrec works, this book offers a critical look at the renegade spirit inhabiting the graphic arts in both Edo and Paris, highlighting the social impulses behind a burgeoning art production.

Xiaojin Wu is Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

  • Author: Xiaojin Wu
  • Softcover
  • Publisher: Seattle Art Museum forthcoming in July 2023
  • 104 pages, 10.8" x 9.5"
  • 70 color illustrations
  • ISBN: 9780932216076
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