*Please note the price is fixed for this item. It is not included in any of our periodic sales (e.g. Black Friday)!*
This is an original Japanese silk screen poster printed in the 1968. This poster is ultra rare and is displayed in the world`s most prestigious galleries such as MoMA in New York City. It is very difficult / almost impossible to find in any condition.
Japan Poster Shop has acquired a substantial and unique collection of original Tadanori Yokoo posters from one of the most prolific collectors in Japan. This individual has a very colorful life story, having invested and dedicated many decades to his love for Tadanori Yokoo`s vibrant designs.
Pop art had the thesis of "descent into the everyday." Yokoo faithfully carried out this thesis, rediscovering pre-modern anonymous images buried in the everyday, such as the aforementioned rising sun patterns, beer labels, hanafuda cards, Edo ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and various lucky charms, and using pre-modern images that at first glance seem anachronistic and full of nostalgia as a source, he created innovative posters. In a sense, Yokoo attempted to overcome modern design by using pre-modern anonymous designs as a negative medium.
The poster for "John Silver Continued," with its Hanafuda border and its silhouette of a person with a traditional Japanese hairstyle, is reminiscent of a lewd Ukiyo-e style nude show, but it also expresses the enthusiasm of Situation Theater, which challenges the established, elegantly prim new theater and the consciousness that supports it. This poster, which could be called a visual scandal, is as threatening as the Situation Theater's plays, but at the same time, it exudes a poignant poetry, something like an outlaw pathos.
All of Yokoo's posters for Tenjo Sajiki, Situation Theatre, and Ankoku Butoh were silkscreen printed. At the time, silkscreen printing was much cheaper than offset or primary color printing, and only a hundred or so copies were required, making it the most economical printing method for small subcultural theater companies.
Silkscreen printing cannot produce the subtle tones that off-white or primary color printing can. Furthermore, although photoengraving is possible, it is crude and coarse, and only monochrome is possible; color photographs cannot be transferred. This means that this printing method can only produce flat, unshaded color divisions, like ukiyo-e woodblock prints, or photoengraving and printing methods that intentionally create a rough look, or a combination of these two, or a mixture of the two. Therefore, in today's world, when advanced reproduction techniques and printing methods have been developed, silkscreen printing can be said to be an extremely primitive and imperfect printing method. However, it is precisely because of this primitive imperfection that silkscreen printing has been highly developed.
It is a medium that retains a handcrafted, intimate feel like woodblock prints or lithographs, not found in offset or primary color printing, which are more common printing methods. Such handcrafted printing methods are themselves subcultural, and are therefore suitable as a means of printing posters for subcultural small theater groups, in the sense that the medium is the message.
However, compared to printing methods such as off-white and primary color plates, which transmit information as a transparent medium through advanced reproduction technology, silkscreen printing, which is a handmade printing method, conveys less information and is more substantial (material) as a medium because it is opaque. Therefore, compared to off-white and primary color plates, silkscreen printing is more likely to inspire artistic belief, that is, an aura of multiple originals, and it is for the above reasons that this method of reproduction has become widely used in printmaking in recent years.
The fact that Yokoo Tadanori's zine-like posters were quickly recognized as artistic was of course due to the content of the images, but it is also true that the silkscreen, which is in a sense an artistic medium, contributed to his success. Yokoo's aims of artistry, agitation for popular culture, and subcultural zine-like communication were fully realized by choosing the medium of silkscreen.
Please refer to the imagery (both front and back) as this is the exact poster that is for sale.
It is over 56 years old!
It is not a reproduction or a reprint.
Certificate of Authenticity included.