This dense composition, with its high viewpoint and use of surface pattern to describe and differentiate spaces, is organized in a kind of packed geometry that rivals some of Harunobu's lively interior scenes. KB, Japanesque At century's end, German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe published the group print album Germinal (1899) to mark the opening of La Maison Moderne, the gallery devoted to Art Nouveau that he operated for several years on rue des Petits-Champs in Paris. Germinal is the first month of spring in the French Republican calendar and had also served as the title of an 1885 novel by Émile Zola. Meier-Graefe intended Germinal as a visual anthology of modernism through a collection of 20 original and facsimile prints by an international roster of living artists.