Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Admiration for Japanese art was a defining characteristic of the Parisian artistic avant-garde in the late 19th century. Henri Rivière took his appreciation further than most, teaching himself the labor-intensive woodblock technique used by Japanese printmakers and using it (and later lithography) to produce print albums that deliberately emulated theirs – most famously, Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, a modern, urban take on Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. This exhibition, the first to showcase SBMA’s extensive holdings of Rivière’s work, traces his career from his early days as a designer of shadow plays for the Cabaret du Chat Noir to the albums of Parisian cityscapes and Breton landscapes with which he made his name.