A look at the floating world

The tour will introduce visitors to the Japanese prints in Belfort's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. The first section will focus on the technique of Japanese wood engraving and several themes that make up Ukiyo-e: kabuki theater, landscapes, courtesans and more. A second parallel tour will trace the history of the municipal collections and the entry of Japanese prints thanks to Camille Lefèvre (1853-1933). An artist-amateur who bequeathed his studio collection to the City of Belfort, Lefèvre provides an opportunity to reflect on the influence of prints in Western art for himself and his contemporaries. The Parisian infatuation with Japan in the 1860s extended to the applied arts, literature, cabarets... But Japanese prints were merely a window through which Westerners idealized the Land of the Rising Sun. The exhibition will place the prints in their context of creation, which only partly reflects the reality of a social class that is not representative of the whole.