Dream Fragment - Keiichi Tanaami

Dream Fragment by Keiichi Tanaami / ISBN 9784907276577 / 96-page paperback with flaps, about 8.5 x 11.5 inches / text in Japanese though it is mostly images / from ele-king books (with their usual high production values)

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A feast with dazzling old and new collages with layers of "dream fragments" and a new painting drawn with a collage-like methodology...Tanaami's unique eroticism explodes across time and space, cultivated by the experience of war in childhood and the experience of pop culture in youth.

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).