Takeda Hideo's Genpei: Defying Authority
Takeda Hideo 武田 秀雄, The Final Illness of Taira Kiyomori (Taira Kiyomori no byōshi 平清盛病死), from the series Genpei 源平, 1985. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Mary Trumbull Adams Art Fund. © Takeda Hideo.
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ 08544
USA
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Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority
A contemporary artist’s irreverent take on The Tale of the Heike, the epic narrative about a famed Japanese civil war.
With an acerbic sense of humor and a bold graphic style, Takeda Hideo (b. 1948) has an international reputation for exaggerated, erotic aesthetics. These tendencies are vividly apparent in his best-known work, Genpei, a series of twenty-two silkscreen prints that radically reimagines the late twelfth-century Genpei civil war (1180–1185) between two rival clans in Japan. The war is well-known through its narrativization as the literary classic The Tale of the Heike, which has exerted a profound influence on Japanese art, literature, performance, and film since its first compilation in the early fourteenth century.
The Tale of the Heike is conventionally understood as a romantic narrative of loyalty, sacrifice, and valor. However, Takeda’s reinterpretation focuses on selected episodes that emphasize acts of cruelty, betrayal, cowardice, and arrogance. His Genpei is a nonliteral, non-comprehensive reimagining of The Tale of the Heike, using searing colors and bold lines to convey complex narratives with his characteristic clarity. This exhibition re-situates Takeda’s series within his career as a satirical cartoonist and in relation to a broader tendency to challenge outdated stereotypes and hypocritical values amid a wave of social and political upheaval in late twentieth-century Japan.
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Exhibition Project Support
Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority is made possible in part by support from the Japan Foundation; the John B. Elliot, Class of 1951, Fund for Asian Art; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; the Morley and Jean Melden Education Fund for Prints and Drawings; Princeton University’s P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art; the Robert W. Bagley Fund for Asian Art; and the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
The accompanying publication is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund and the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University.
Exhibitions at the Princeton University Art Museum are made possible by the many generous contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund: Allen R. Adler and Frances Beatty Adler, Len and Laura Berlik, Julie Neuffer Callaghan and Kevin T. Callaghan, John L. Cecil and Celia A. Felsher, Jeannie and Jitender Chopra, John and Susan Diekman, Donald and Martine E. Elefson, Barbara Essig, Luke Evnin and Deann Wright, William S. Fisher and Sakurako D. Fisher, Stacey Roth Goergen and Robert Goergen, Preston H. Haskell III, Robert and Lynn Johnston, Gene and Sueyun Locks, David and Catherine Loevner, Shelly and Tony Malkin, Edward E. Matthews, Dean and Jill Mitchell, Christopher E. Olofson, Anne C. Sherrerd, Preeti and Sanjay Swani, and Theodora D. Walton and William H. Walton III.
Additional support is provided by Tena and Chris Achen, Stephanie H. Bernheim, Sarah Lee Elson, Christopher C. Forbes and Astrid Forbes, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Paul G. Haaga Jr. and Heather Sturt Haaga, Padmaja Kumari Parmar and Kush M. Parmar, Mark W. Stevens and Annalyn Martha Swan, Judy and Ed Stier, Jonathan Lee Walton.
