Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec

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 (...