Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics

Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics PDF Author: Anne Nishimura Morse
Publisher: Museum of Fine Arts Boston
ISBN: 9780878468492
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The lineage of the "superflat" Murakami's vision of the Japanese aesthetic Takashi Murakami's irreverent, pop culture-infused art has made him one of the most recognized Japanese artists today. His bright, contemporary boisterousness, however, belies his deep scholarship and engagement with traditional Japanese art. Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics presents key examples of Murakami's work alongside a rich selection of Japanese masterpieces spanning several centuries and arranged here according to concepts laid out by his mentor and foil, leading Japanese art historian Nobuo Tsuji. These include works by Kawanabe Kyosai, Soga Shohaku, Kano Eino, Ito Jakuchu and Hishikawa Moronobu. Beautifully illustrated with Tsuji's selections from the peerless Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as some of the artist's best-known works of painting and sculpture, the combination of old and new in this groundbreaking volume enriches our understanding of each, and ultimately shows us how contemporary art can be seen as part of a continuum or lineage. Takashi Murakami (born 1962) is an internationally acclaimed artist and the founder and president of Kaikai Kiki, an art production and management company based in Tokyo with a studio in New York City. He was the first person to earn a PhD in Nihonga--a form of Japanese paintings created using traditional materials and techniques--at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Over the last two decades, he has presented numerous exhibitions around the world, from Versailles to Qatar. His first major solo exhibition at a US museum was held in 2001 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, titled Takashi Murakami: Made in Japan. Murakami is well known for his corporate branding projects with Louis Vuitton, VANS, shu uemura, Issey Miyake, Lucien Pellat-Finet, Roppongi Hills and ComplexCon, as well as collaborations with musicians such as Kanye West and Pharrell Williams. In 2008, he was selected as one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People." More recently, he has been working on film and animation productions, releasing his first live-action film, Jellyfish Eyes, in 2013 and an animated television series, 6HP (Six Hearts Princess), in 2017.

Lineage of Eccentrics

Lineage of Eccentrics PDF Author: Nobuo Tsuji
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Eccentrics and eccentricities in art
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description


History of Art in Japan

History of Art in Japan PDF Author: Nobuo Tsuji
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231193412
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
In this book the leading authority on Japanese art history sheds light on how Japan has nurtured distinctive aesthetics, prominent artists, and movements that have achieved global influence and popularity. The History of Art in Japan discusses works ranging from earthenware figurines in 13,000 BCE to manga, anime, and modern subcultures.

Eccentrics

Eccentrics PDF Author: David Joseph Weeks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
From 1859 to 1880, Joshua Abraham Norton thought he was Emperor of the United States. Ann Atkin keeps 7,500 garden gnomes in her backyard. Brooklyn artist Peter McGough dresses and acts as if it were 1895. These are just a few of the eccentrics discussed by Dr. Weeks, the world's foremost expert on the subject.

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay PDF Author: Christopher Benfey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes) An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America’s unique craft tradition. In Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories—of his mother’s upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father’s escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College—unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.

The Great Wave

The Great Wave PDF Author: Christopher Benfey
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307432270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.” These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

Many Subtle Channels

Many Subtle Channels PDF Author: Daniel Levin Becker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Main description: What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau-and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature's quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for 0workshop for potential literature0) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec's novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker's love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman's delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic-and iconoclastic-group.

The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature

The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature PDF Author: Mario Poceski
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190225750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature explores the historical growth and transformation of Chan (Zen) Buddhist literature in medieval China, focusing especially on the earliest records of Mazu Daoyi (709-788). It presents important primary materials about classical Chan Buddhism, some of them translated for the first time into English.

Rosetsu

Rosetsu PDF Author: Matthew McKelway
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN: 9783791357263
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Accompanying a major exhibition on the 18th-century Japanese painter Nagasawa Rosetsu, this book features the artist's most important paintings. Born into the family of a low-ranking samurai, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-1799) is renowned today as one of the most imaginative artists of early modern Japan. His visually stunning and highly idiosyncratic paintings earned him a place in Japan's "Lineage of Eccentrics." This book surveys Rosetsu's art with sixty of his most important paintings, beginning with his earliest works in the realist mode of his teacher Maruyama Okyo, and ending with his haunting, visionary, and occasionally bizarre final masterpieces. Screen paintings, scrolls, and albums depicting Zen eccentrics, raucous children, ethereal beauties, otherworldly landscapes, and vivacious animals and birds take viewers on a journey through Rosetsu's own travels and into his unbridled imagination.

Kamisaka Sekka

Kamisaka Sekka PDF Author: Sekka Kamisaka
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications
ISBN: 9780764961755
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Japan's Meiji era was a time of dramatic cultural change. Industry, the military, transportation, fashion, architecture, the arts - all aspects of Meiji society embraced modernisation. Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942) flourished during this vibrant period. Deeply rooted in tradition - he led the revival of Rinpa, a style created in the 17th century - Sekka was a progenitor of modern design in Japan, creating imaginative, innovative imagery. He cooperated with other artisans to apply his designs to ceramics, lacquerware, and textiles, and so became an influential transitional figure. In addition to his work as a designer, Sekka produced several suites of prints, published as multivolume books. When he transformed his paintings into woodcuts for reproduction, he revised his style to suit the medium. The resulting graphics are imbued with his signature elegant and delicate touch and reflect the artist's melding of Western and Japanese design influences. The Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California, holds a magnificent collection of Kamisaka Sekka's works. Chosen for this book are the complete sets of prints from three of his best-known publications: All Kinds of Things (Chigusa), All Kinds of Butterflies (Cho- senshu) and Things from Many Worlds (Momoyogusa). More than 160 woodblock prints are collected here, with an introductory essay authored by Andreas Marks, Director and Chief Curator at the Clark Center.