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Kawaii! Vacances d'été: Perfect Time
Artist
Takashi Murakami
(Japanese, born 1962)
Date2018
MediumGold leaf and acrylic on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 118 1/8 × 275 9/16 × 3 in. (3000 × 7000 × 76.2 mm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund and Museum purchase
Object number2019.12.A-G
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Takashi Murakami
Category
Label TextColorful cartoon flowers smile and wave from a gleaming gold skyscape in Takashi Murakami’s Kawaii! Vacances d’été: Perfect Time, 2018. A field of daisies traverses a seven-part canvas, a nod to seventeenth-century gilt Japanese screens featuring botanical imagery and to the French Impressionist Claude Monet’s late, large-scale paintings of water lilies, which were inspired in part by Japanese art. To these precedents, Murakami added the stylized graphics and commercial printing techniques favored by the American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Like Warhol and his Factory, Murakami collaborates with a production team, Kaikai Kiki, to fabricate his works.
The daisies grew out of Murakami’s Superflat theory, which holds that in a world metaphorically flattened by global commerce and by the release—accidental or willful—of atomic energy, distinctions have collapsed between high art and popular culture, old and new, and original and derivative. The daisies have become one of the artist’s iconic motifs, one of the most internationally recognized emblems of contemporary art, and, appropriate to a Superflat world, one of the most heavily merchandised.
Kawaii! Vacances d’été: Perfect Time evokes a sumptuous interior of yesteryear, the pleasant heat of a long summer day, and, more darkly, the glow of a nuclear disaster, like the detonations that ended World War II in the swelter of August. Murakami’s baby-faced daisies are mutants born of radiation, flatlined and dimensionless, simultaneously dehumanized anthropomorphs and kawaii mushroom clouds. Kawaii! Vacances d’été embodies fun and peril, sun and shadow, and the prospect of an ultimate reckoning.
The daisies grew out of Murakami’s Superflat theory, which holds that in a world metaphorically flattened by global commerce and by the release—accidental or willful—of atomic energy, distinctions have collapsed between high art and popular culture, old and new, and original and derivative. The daisies have become one of the artist’s iconic motifs, one of the most internationally recognized emblems of contemporary art, and, appropriate to a Superflat world, one of the most heavily merchandised.
Kawaii! Vacances d’été: Perfect Time evokes a sumptuous interior of yesteryear, the pleasant heat of a long summer day, and, more darkly, the glow of a nuclear disaster, like the detonations that ended World War II in the swelter of August. Murakami’s baby-faced daisies are mutants born of radiation, flatlined and dimensionless, simultaneously dehumanized anthropomorphs and kawaii mushroom clouds. Kawaii! Vacances d’été embodies fun and peril, sun and shadow, and the prospect of an ultimate reckoning.