Publications

Takeda Hideo has worked across media throughout his long career, from painting and print design to cartooning, photography, and sculpture. Endlessly flexible, frequently surprising, and often surreal, his work injects dark humor into a wide range of subjects, with a touch of irreverence and incorporating sexual elements, distortion, and dynamic composition. This book examines the body of work for which Takeda is best known, Genpei, a series of silkscreen prints portraying battle scenes from the twelfth-century Genpei War.

Kit Brooks looks at the ways in which the series challenges the romanticization of war and long-standing attitudes about Japan’s classical past. Previous scholarship has often characterized Genpei as a successor to a long tradition of representing The Tale of the Heike, a Japanese literary classic that narrativizes the Genpei War and romanticizes the conflict. Takeda’s selection of episodes overwhelmingly highlights acts of betrayal, cowardice, and cruelty on the part of the samurai “heroes.” Brooks argues that the series is part of a wider twentieth-century turn that challenged the perpetuation of outdated and hypocritical values of the samurai in Japanese society, thus positioning Takeda as a forerunner to well-known international artists like the global phenomenon Murakami Takashi, who have similarly reworked historical Japanese aesthetics with a flat, comic-like visuality as a means to address contemporary social issues.

The first major book in English on the artist in several decades, Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority features an interview with the artist in both English and Japanese.

Alexandra Letvin and Elena Torok

James Christen Steward

With contributions by Paul Goldberger, Ron McCoy, Mark Stevens, and Susan Stewart

Principal photography by Richard Barnes

Minor White

Edited by Todd Cronan, Peter C. Bunnell, and Andrew Kensett

Edited by Karl Kusserow
Contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Kirsten Pai Buick, Ellery E. Foutch, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Rebecca Zorach, and Karl Kusserow

108 Pages

Edited by Karl Kusserow
Contributions by Alan C. Braddock, Maura Coughlin, Rachael Z. DeLue, T. J. Demos, Mónica Domínguez Torres, Finis Dunaway, Stephen F. Eisenman, Emily Gephart, Karl Kusserow, De-nin D. Lee, Gregory Levine, Anne McClintock, James Nisbet, Andrew Patrizio, Sugata Ray, and Greg M. Thomas

Edited by Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh
Contributions by Jeremy Adelman, Rachael Z. DeLue, Nadya Bair, Katherine A. Bussard, Sharon Corwin, Erika Doss, Dolores Flamiano, Michel Frizot, Thierry Gervais, Kristen Gresh, Ellen Handy, Robert Hariman, Jason E. Hill, Liam Kennedy, James Leighton, Dalia Habib Linssen, John Louis Lucaites, Amanda Maddox, Mary Panzer, Paul Roth, Caitlin E. Ryan, Alissa Schapiro, Sally Stein, and Catherine Zuromskis

Edited by John Elderfield

Contributions by Faya Causey, John Elderfield, Sara Green, Annemarie Iker, Ariel Kline, and Anna Swinbourne

Zoe S. Kwok

Edited by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock
Contributions by Alan C. Braddock, Miranda Belarde-Lewis, Rachael Z. DeLue, Teddy Cruz, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Mark Dion, Fonna Forman, Laura Turner Igoe, Robin Kelsey, Timothy Morton, Rob Nixon, Kimia Shahi, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Mitra Abbaspour, Calvin Brown, and Erica Cooke

Anne McCauley
Contributions by Peter C. Bunnell, Verna Posever Curtis, Perrin M. Lathrop, Adrienne Lundgren, Barbara L. Michaels, Ying Sze Pek, and Caitlin E. Ryan