![]() ![]() The current exhibit features multiple pieces from a new “Pleasure of Picasso” series, for which Tanaami obsessively copied and reinterpreted some of the Spanish artist’s “Mother and Child” works. ![]() Speaking as if slightly bemused by his fame, he showed no signs of flagging energy even after two hours of talking. He regards himself as mostly a borrower rather than an inventor: “Eighty percent of my work is made from the influence of others,” said Tanaami, who wore a short-sleeved, sky blue Paul Smith button-down shirt imprinted with white pineapple silhouettes, khaki trousers and a tan beanie on his diminutive head. ![]() When he told his mother later that day about what he had seen, she accused him of lying, because she would have never let him out of her sight during an air raid. While Tanaami, now 86, did experience multiple Allied bombings during the war, he concocted that particular memory of terror in the field. Tanaami, recounting the memory decades later, said he even glimpsed the pilot in the cockpit as the plane flew across the field. In slow motion, she fell back to the ground. And then suddenly, a fighter plane shot her, blasting her into the air. As he cowered in the grass, a young woman in a red dress appeared, only her upper body visible. During World War II, when he had fled the capital with his mother and two brothers to escape the incessant firebombings, he recalls running to an open field after hearing an air raid siren. ![]() When I visited him recently at his Tokyo studio, Keiichi Tanaami, one of Japan’s premier pop artists, told me a horrific story from his childhood. ![]()
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