With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 - which facilitated travel between France and Japan - and the 1878 World's Fair, Paris was literally overwhelmed with Japanese art and finally recognized its importance.By the end of the century, the style was widespread in many contexts and was known as Japonisme, a term that refers both to a somewhat superficial and mannered fascination with all things East Asian and to the influence the art of the Land of the Rising Sun had on the works of some European artists. One of these artists was none other than Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec encountered Japanese art on two important occasions: the 1890 exhibition of over seven hundred prints at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the following year while working on reorganizing the archive of the writer and art critic Theodore Duret, a major collector of prints by Hokusai and Utamaro. Like many of his contemporaries, Lautrec also collected Japanese objects (masks, pillows, kakemono - decorative hanging wall scrolls with paintings or calligraphy - fans and small sculptures). These objects also often appear in his works, as integral parts of the scenes he painted. He went so far as to buy ink and brushes from Japan to learn how to use them. But Lautrec's relationship to Japanese art goes well beyond simple aesthetic curiosity or the trends of his time: the linear simplicity of his works and the flat application of color especially in his graphic works, well represented in this exhibition, are clearly inherited from the many Japanese prints Lautrec immersed himself in and perhaps even copied. Additionally, the composition of each page, where spatial depth emerges from an imposing foreground, brushstrokes that seem to be painted in a single motion, and a taste for simplification of the subjects, removing almost all of their specific identifying features, all lend Lautrec's works the same sense of strength and liveliness found in Japanese prints. Artists from the Land of the Rising Sun also used color in a way that strongly influenced Lautrec, seen both in the delicate colors of some of his lithographs (inspired by 17th-century prints) and in the pure,intense colors applied in a continuous field and bounded by a single outline, typical of his posters. A perfect example is Lautrec's advertising poster for the famous Divan Japonais cabaret, where the decor and the waiters' uniforms were in an Oriental style. The poster features incisive, elegant, simple lines and juxtapositions of brilliant yellows and flat blacks. Lautrec signed this affiche with his name, but he would soon start marking his works with a sort of stamp, a graphic design based on his initials, in the manner of the Ukiyo-e masters.