"With Admiral Perry's penetration of isolationist Japan in 1854, the current of Japanese trade flowed west again, bearing, among other orientalia, the colored woodcuts of Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, and their contemporaries. Some of the most avid collectors of the Japanese prints were French impressionists and Nabis, who found in the Ukiyo-e woodcuts new ways to treat their own prints: with bolder, flatter forms; asymmetrical compositions; new colors, startling in their range of boldness to subtlety; and an altered, often elevated, viewpoint. The typical Japanese subject matter--frank, close-range glimpses of ordinary people and familiar events--set Degas, Lautrec, and others off to draw the back rooms and backstages of Paris, its boudoirs and brothels, its crowds and the cafés and dance halls. Colta Feller Ives, Associate Curator of Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, recounts the phenomenal 'cult of Japan' in late nineteenth-century France and reveals its particular impacts on the etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and aquatints of Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin. The Great Wave illustrates the French Prints side by side with the Ukiyo-e cuts that inspired them and also contains a chronology of related events, notes, and a selected bibliography." -- Provided by publisher
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