poster
- Museum number
- 2011,3050.1
- Title
- Object: Setsudan sareta koyubi ni sasageru baraado 切断された小指に捧げるバラード (Ballad to a Severed Little Finger)
- Description
-
Silkscreened poster. Depiction of the actor Takakura Ken in the role of a yakuza (Japanese gangster).
- Production date
- 1966
- Dimensions
-
Height: 102 centimetres
-
Width: 73 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- Yokoo Tadanori is a leading living exponent of ‘pop art’ in Japan, active first as a theatre and graphic designer and poster artist and more recently as a painter. As early as 1972 a solo exhibition of his graphic works was staged at New York MOMA. This is the first of a series of poster designs in which Yokoo expressed his admiration for celebrities – in this case the star of gangster (yakuza) movies, Takakura Ken (born 1931), here shown wielding a sword in the foreground. Takakura later featured more extensively in the photobook Yūkon, Takakura Ken (1971), also designed by Yokoo (Asia 2011,3021.1). Yokoo suggests that, in the manner of a Japanese gangster, he would sever the end of his little finger to show the sincerity of his admiration for the actor. The composition includes a small inset self-portrait by the artist and a reference to Hokusai’s Great Wave. A copy of the poster is in the collection of the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art. See Tanikawa Koichi, 100 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo (London, 1978), no. 22, where there is a commentary on the work. (T. Clark, 12/2011)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
2012 Feb – Jun, BM Japanese Galleries, ‘Japan from Prehistory to the Present’
- Acquisition date
- 2011
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 2011,3050.1
