PARIS.- In the context of its seasonal theme Art and Erotism in the East, and as a follow-up to the exhibition Kama- Sutra, the Pinacothèque de Paris wishes to provide the public with a singular approach to erotic life and culture in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1867). The exhibition The Art of Love in the Time of Geishas: Forbidden Japanese Masterpieces is the first ever shown in France, on these famous prints that deal with all our phantasms and Far-Eastern imaginary.

The Edo period’s prosperity favoured the birth of a dominant middle class at the core of the great Japanese cities: the chonin (city-dewellers). Those shopkeepers, artisans, doctors, teachers or artists enhanced, thanks to the approach of the ukiyo-e cultural movement, a hedonistic conception of life that was in contrast to the neo-Confucian Japanese culture of the governing warrior classes. The ukiyo-e movement, images of the floating world», was the fruit of an aesthetic and moral reflection on the brief and transitory character of life, wherein the angle of idealized feminine beauty, and of the erotic imaginary, occupied an overwhelming space.

The polychrome etchings of beautiful women (bijinga), and the erotic ones – the shunga, “images of springtime” –, were its most significant manifestations of this time. They were at their peak during the Edo period and reflect the way of life: refined, luxurious and modern of the chonin’s class, who attended theatres, pleasure-loving areas, organized parties and upheld a life turned towards pleasure and the satisfaction of personal desires. In parallel to this artistic expression, of which Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Hiroshige or also Katsushika Hokusai were its greatest masters, literature also became a means of expression of that floating world thanks to the ukiyozoshi, the ukiyo novels.

Secretly collected in Europe by the leading artistic personalities, such as Gustav Klimt or Émile Zola, as soon as Japan opened up to the West in 1868, the ukiyo-e etchings led to the birth and development of “Japanism” at the end of the 19th century.

The exhibition The Art of Love in the Time of Geishas: Forbidden Japanese Masterpieces offers over 200 etchings, photographs in albumin and objects taken from daily life, provided by the Museo delle Culture de Lugano, as well as other great public museums in Switzerland and Italy. A group of modern and contemporary works, plates of mangas and paintings, bear witness to the continuity of this erotic tradition up to contemporary Japan.