Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower

The Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, which occupied Henri Rivière for the better part of a decade, are almost the distilled essence of the passion for Japanese art, especially color woodblock prints, that consumed the French art world in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Rivière’s specific model was Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, made about 1830, which capture the way that Mount Fujiyama plays hide-and-seek in the landscape around Tokyo. The mountain is always present, sometimes immediately visible and sometimes an almost-hidden presence in the background, peeking over a fringe of tress or peeking out between buildings. Rivière had noted that the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, played a similar role as one traveled around Paris, and he created this album as a sort of modern, industrial homage to Hokusai’s views of the sacred mountain.

Rivière was a master of color woodcut, and his original goal was to emulate not just the viusal experience of Hokusai’s book, but also its technique. That project never came to pass, and the prints exists only in this version, rendered in color lithography. In some ways, that seems fitting, as lithography was the up-to-date mass medium of turn-of-the century Paris, just as color woodcut had been the medium of popular image making in the Japan of the 1830s.