Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec

Renegade Edo and Paris is an unveiling of the shared renegade ethos that characterized the graphic arts and social cultures of eighteenth to nineteenth century Edo (present-day Tokyo) and late nineteenth century Paris. This catalogue features Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints (pictures of the floating world) from the Seattle Art Museum’s Japanese collection, alongside private loans of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901).  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, 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. Many such pictures arrived in France in the 1860s, a time when French art and society were experiencing significant changes. As artists searched for fresh and more expressive forms, Toulouse-Laut