A Clockwork Marilyn.

Tokyo.: Gallery Décor., 1972. Loose as issued in original black and neon pink portfolio, housed in the original outer cardboard mailing box with string ties. Dampstaining to left edge of box. (47 x 62 cm).. Title + half-title sheets, printed red and black on yellow card. Complete with 12 original screenprints by Keiichi Tanaami, each numbered, dated and signed by the artist in pencil. Few pf the prints with a small area of staining to lower left corner of sheet and foxing to right edge, not affecting the image. Overall a very good set. Keiichi Tanaami was born in Tokyo in 1936 and graduated from the college of design at Musashino Art University. Since the 1960s he has traversed the boundaries of media and genre, active in graphic design and illustration, and also animation, experimental film, painting, and sculpture. During the ’60s, Tanaami’s works played a significant role in the introduction of pop art and psychedelic culture into Japan. He designed, for instance, album covers for the Japanese releases of The Monkees’ “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd” (1967) and Jefferson Airplane’s “After Bathing at Baxter’s” (1967), and contributed a series of silkscreened works entitled ‘No More War’ to the anti-war poster contest held by American magazine Avant Garde in 1968. Tanaami was quick to focus on the possibilities of pop art in its application of the rules of design, and constantly experimented with the application of techniques such as multicolour printing and image sampling. During this same period, Tanaami, inspired by Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, also concentrated his efforts on creating experimental film and animation. Inspired by the contexts of American pop art and the impact of his first visit to New York in 1967, Tanaami went on to produce, throughout the early ‘70s, original illustrations, personal collage books, and oil paintings of the contemporary celebrity idols and actresses of the time, and erotic animation created for the late night Japanese TV program ‘11pm’. One such animation was Tanaami’s “Good-By Marilyn” from 1971, a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, erotic pop art commentary on the contemporary U.S.A. The film was shown in the exhibition ‘Celluloid Born in America’, held at the Gallery Décor in Tokyo in 1971. The following year the same gallery was to exhibit Tanaami’s set of screenprints entitled ‘A Clockwork Marilyn’. This portfolio of twelve screenprints perfectly mirror a time when Japan’s postwar society was enjoying a new LSD-inspired prosperity, a time when economic consumption was booming, and the credo of free love was prevalent. In this environment, Tanaami combined the art of the absurd with the pop art of materialism and mass consumption. Just as in his animations, ‘A Clockwork Marilyn’ combines dream-like manga iconography blended with pornography. Tanaami’s psychedlic use of images culled from American pornographic magazines, as evident in ‘A Clockwork Marilyn’ becomes a standard for his output during the early 1970’s, and it lead to him becoming the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy in 1975. The portfolio was printed in an edition of 55 copies, stamp-numbered on the title page.