notes.husk.org/likes images.

It’s a cliché, right? Something people hang on their walls to look worldly?

One thing that I like about it is that that’s what it was designed for. This is some of the first secular, pictorial art meant to be mass-produced for middle-class people.

Also, that blue is Prussian blue – the stuff in blueprint/cyanotype. It came from Europe and had great influence on Japanese popular art, and that art with its blues came right back across and influenced European art. I’m not familiar with the facts of the case, but I suspect it’s safe to suggest that Picasso’s blue period owes something to the merchants who took Prussian pigment to Japan in the early 1800s.

I like this a lot visually. It’s also, for me, a landmark somewhere right near the edge of what feels contemporary.