de Young Museum

The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 is the first major exhibition to explore the unconventional creativity of the British Aesthetic Movement, tracing the evolution of this movement from a small circle of progressive artists and poets, through the achievements of innovative painters and architects, to its broad impact on fashion and the middle-class home. The superb artworks on view encompass the manifold forms of Victorian material culture: the traditional high art of painting, fashionable trends in architecture and interior decoration, handmade and manufactured furnishings for the “artistic” home, art photography, and the new modes of dress.

Camille Pissarro had a unique and lifelong interest in the human figure. From his earliest years in the Caribbean and Venezuela until his death in Paris in 1903, Pissarro drew, painted, and made prints featuring human subjects from every walk of life, which outnumber the figural works of his colleagues Monet and Sisley. Pissarro’s People celebrates the painter’s humanism in all its aspects and brings together nearly 100 works of art, including some 37 paintings and numerous works on paper made over the course of his entire career. Highlights include portraits of the artist’s friends and family as well as notable genre scenes set in the fields and marketplaces of rural France. Pissarro’s paintings of townspeople, peasants, and farm workers stress their individuality rather than their mythic qualities, which so preoccupied Millet, his predecessor in the agricultural figural tradition.

The flowering of popular culture during Japan's Edo period (1600–1868) brought about a revolution in Japanese publishing and the art of the book. With prosperity and the spread of literacy, particularly among the merchant class, a great variety of reading material developed, including illustrated books of poetry, legends and folk-tales, romances, and travel guides. Other categories, including picture books (ehon), artist instruction manuals (gafu), and erotic books developed around life in the "floating world" (ukiyo), the lively subculture that flourished in the licensed pleasure quarters of cities such as Edo (today's Tokyo), Osaka and Kyoto.