A Western man clad in a kimono sits in his tatami-floored studio with his paintings strewn about him. In the background a shamisen stands in a wooden box, its neck jutting upward.
This photograph, now showing at the Yokohama Museum of Art, is of Paul Jacoulet -- a French artist who in the 1930s breathed new life into the world of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, but who remains almost totally unknown to the Japanese public. The museum is currently hosting the first large-scale exhibition devoted to Jacoulet, who lived in Japan almost all his life and died here in 1960.
Visitors to "The Rainbow Vision of French Ukiyo-e Artist Paul Jacoulet" will not see traditional ukiyo-e subjects, such as landscapes or beautiful Japanese women. Instead, they will be struck by a large number of predominantly pastel-hued, though vivid -- and often erotic -- portraits of the indigenous people of Micronesia.