NYAB Event - “Demimonde: The Floating World and Toulouse-Lautrec” Exhibition

“Demimonde: The Floating World and Toulouse-Lautrec” Exhibition

Ronin Gallery

This event has ended.

Ronin Gallery presents Demimonde: The Floating World and Toulouse-Lautrec, a stunning juxtaposition of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and lithographs and the Japanese woodblock prints that inspired him. From masterworks of ukiyo-e, by artists such as Harunobu, Utamaro, and Sharaku, to Toulouse-Lautrec’s Divan Japonais and the complete Le Café Concert, the exhibition invites you to explore the parallel demimondes of fin-de-siècle Paris and Edo-period Japan.

Arriving in Europe as early as the 1830s, ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world” reverberated throughout the hearts of Western artists, reaching the height of fashion by the 1870s. The compositional daring, sharp diagonals, bold, flat blocks of color, and love for the quotidian captured the imagination of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists alike. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was smitten. The influence of the Japanese prints that he so avidly collected, is apparent throughout his oeuvre, but particularly resonates through his prints. Like the ukiyo-e artists in Japan, Toulouse-Lautrec intended his lithographs to be enjoyed by a wide audience, visible from the street in the windows of cabarets and café concerts of Montmartre.

Through this larger lens of the demimonde, this exhibition considers the elements of Japonisme in Toulouse-Lautrec’s work. A comparison of Sharaku’s kabuki portrait Iwai Hanshiro IV as Shigenoi (1794) and Lautrec’s bust lithograph of Jeanne Granier (1898) reveals Lautrec’s affinity for a dramatic profile, and admiration for the deeply expressive, highly individualized faces of Sharaku’s actors. Utamaro’s Courtesan Hitomoto (1805) demonstrates the truncation of form, union of text and image, and contrast of complex lines and flat areas of color found in Lautrec’s vision of Jane Avril in Divan Japonais (1893).

Though separated by an ocean and nearly a century, fin-de-siècle Paris and Edo’s floating world share in the celebration of worldly pleasure. From the elegant courtesans of Edo’s Yoshiwara to the myriad pleasures of Paris’ Moulin Rouge, the ukiyo-e artists and Toulouse-Lautrec embraced the world of actors, courtesans, and other spectral figures of their respective pleasure cultures. Both invite their visitor a fleeting escape into a beautiful, if shadowed, realm.