I heard two discussions of Takashi Murakami’s show in Los Angeles today, from people who could not be more different. And basically, it sounds and looks fascinating.
Murakami’s facility with Japanese art history has always been one of his secret superpowers. And it sounds like the current SUPERFLAT show at Perrotin slots into his overarching and innovative critique of western art history’s relationship to Japanese art and culture. It looks specifically at 18th and 19th century Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, and their connection to and co-optation by the Impressionists and the Japonisme movement.
Murakami has made intricate copies of ukiyo-e that traveled to 19th century France. And he’s made a full-scale copy of Monet’s 1875 painting, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and her Son. Whether it’s a work like the Monet, painted in one quick, plein air session, or the dense woodblock prints, Murakami unifies them with his own technique, described as, “layer upon layer of silkscreened acrylic paint, applied with a special squeegee work application method.”
Which, what?? I am absolutely down for using exhaustive screenprinting for a monotype. But after seeing details on Perrotin’s website, this squeegee work application method is beyond my understanding. And I, for one, would like to see it.
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE] Oh, right, I can.
I googled at first, but only found that I’d joined the legion of content mills who republished Murakami’s press release text as-is. So I ended up at the sources.
Here are details of how Murakami translated Monet’s wet-on-wet brushstrokes into however many screens. Sometimes the scratchy structure of an emptied brush gets preserved, like the tan dots above the ‘M’. And sometimes it becomes a gradient of color, like the bottom of the ‘t’.
Some colors get more intense in Murakami’s version, like that mustardy flame above the ‘n’, which is barely a thing in the Monet. But that same effect also makes the bare canvas/underlayer of Monet much more intricate. Like everything going on above the ‘et’ feels very different. Murakami’s resolution is higher, or seems higher, an oversharpening fallacy. But his colors look more liquid; they were laid down in the precise shape of a flow that never happened.