Takashi Murakami's cartoon-bright paintings are not a break from Japanese art history. They are an argument that the break never happened. That argument is easier to make with three hundred years of paintings in the room to prove it.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston mounted that argument as an exhibition and published it as a book: Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics. It sets his paintings and sculpture against Edo-period and early modern Japanese works from the museum's own collection, edited with an introduction by curator Anne Nishimura Morse.
What is Superflat?
Murakami coined the term in 2000, in a manifesto that accompanied an exhibition of the same name. The claim: Japanese visual culture, from Edo-period screen painting to postwar anime, shares a flatness, meaning a resistance to Western-style linear perspective and illusionistic depth, and that flatness runs underneath everything from woodblock prints to character design. Superflat treats that flatness as a lineage, not a coincidence.
Lineage of Eccentrics takes the theory out of the manifesto and tests it against actual paintings.
Who is Nobuo Tsuji, and what are his six categories?
Tsuji is an art historian, and Murakami's mentor. Long before Superflat, Tsuji had already argued that Japanese art history needed better categories than "traditional" and "modern." The book borrows six of his terms: Superflat, Animation, Kazari, Asobi, Religiosity, and Eccentricity, and sorts both the historical paintings and Murakami's own work into the same system. The two men are in conversation at the end of the book, mentor and counterweight talking through what the categories actually mean.
Which historical painters appear alongside Murakami?
Kawanabe Kyōsai, Soga Shōhaku, Kanō Einō, Itō Jakuchū, and Hishikawa Moronobu. These painters span roughly the 17th through 19th centuries, working in wildly different registers, from Kanō-school orthodoxy to Jakuchū's obsessive, near-hallucinatory detail. The book doesn't present them as Murakami's influences so much as his relatives.
Why pair a pop artist with 17th-century eccentrics?
Because there is an easy reading of Murakami that misses the argument he is actually making. In that reading he is the cute one, the commercial artist, the Louis Vuitton collaborator with a gift-shop's worth of merchandise. Eccentricity, kazari (ornament, decoration for its own sake), asobi (play): these aren't modern impulses smuggled into old Japanese art. Tsuji found them there first. Murakami's case is that his own flatness and his own excess belong to the same family, several centuries late.
The same instinct, mending and reworking rather than discarding, shows up in humbler Japanese textiles. See our piece on boro for a parallel lineage, cloth instead of canvas.
Two more artists get the museum-book treatment on the Journal this week: how Hayao Miyazaki's films actually get made, and what Yoshitomo Nara's record collection has to do with his paintings.
The book
- Hardcover, 184 pages
- 8.5 × 10 in
- 80 color images
- MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018
- ISBN 9780878468492
Find Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics in the KNOWLEDGE collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is Superflat, in one sentence?
Murakami's term, coined in 2000, for a continuity of flatness running from Edo-period painting through postwar anime and manga.
Who is Nobuo Tsuji?
An art historian and Murakami's mentor, whose six categories structure the book: Superflat, Animation, Kazari, Asobi, Religiosity, Eccentricity.
Is this a Murakami monograph or an art history book?
Both. It reads as an exhibition catalogue that puts Murakami's paintings and sculpture in direct conversation with five historical Japanese painters, rather than treating him in isolation.
Who edited the book?
Anne Nishimura Morse, who also wrote the introduction, for MFA Publications.
Does it cover Murakami's fashion collaborations, like Louis Vuitton?
No. The book stays with painting and sculpture, and the argument for their place in Japanese art history, rather than his commercial work.
sabi is an online boutique based in Portland, Oregon. Our KNOWLEDGE collection is the reference shelf, books on the things we sell and the ideas underneath them.