A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami
A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami / ISBN 9784898152911 / 116-page book and 14 short films on DVD (run time of 100 minutes), produced in France in 2009, with the short texts in French/English/Japanese / the DVD is NTSC, though I can’t guarantee it will play in your system (you never know with DVDs from Europe)
New copy.
***
Keiichi Tanaami (born 1936) was a protagonist of Japan’s postwar avant-garde, and one of the first Japanese artists to successfully blend art and commerce. Tanaami’s artwork was appearing in advertisements and magazines as early as 1962, when American Pop art was still in the ascendant. A trip to New York in 1968 provided a transformative encounter with Andy Warhol, which encouraged Tanaami to pursue several paths at once, and he was soon producing poster designs, happenings, prints and album covers, developing an assured, erotic psychedelic style populated with butterfly women, chimneys and breasts (a meeting with Robert Crumb and an appreciation of American underground comics was also significant).