Traditionally, popular culture--ephemeral structures built for festivals and parades, popular prints, albums, and forms of entertainment such as cabaret and puppetry--were understood to be separate from the "fine arts" of painting and sculpture. Modern artists such as David, Blake, Courbet, Manet, Van Gogh, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec, deliberately incorporated popular artifacts and practices into their art, and definitively blurred the boundaries between so-called "high" and "low" culture. We will study the interaction of the two, about which much has been written lately, and speculate about how and why this legacy is still a part of our own artistic climate.