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Take your choice: Should you order “Tattoo Parlour by Ed Hardy Men’s Deodorant Body Spray” ($7.36) online? Or should you visit the de Young Museum (for $28) and see a full-fledged retrospective exhibit honoring the iconic San Franciscan and “father of modern tattoo culture”?
Both choices have their upside. The de Young show marks San Francisco’s third exhibit in the past year exploring tattoos as art, culture and history.
Hardy actually wrote the book that inspired the first exhibit, “Lew the Jew and His Circle,” a popular show that closed in June after an 11-month run at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. “Lew the Jew” Alberts was the famed influential New York tattoo artist from the turn of the 20th century, and his circle included “Brooklyn Joe” Lieber, who lived and worked in Alameda.
The exhibit “Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin” digs back only into the 1950s, but eventually shows the artist’s debt to the kinds of Japanese prints on view in “Tattoos in Japanese Prints,” an exhibit at the Asian Art Museum through Aug. 18. The show elevates tattooed characters in woodblock prints by 19th century masters. They’re surprisingly bold, colorful and action-packed.
The first image in Hardy’s big, colorful show is a vastly enlarged black-and-white photograph. It depicts the artist at 10 years old, living in Southern California, “tattooing” a friend’s back with watercolor pencils. (Sometimes he would use his mother’s Maybelline eyeliner.)
Flash forward to the 1960s: Hardy, now a printmaking student at the San Francisco Art Institute, studies works by Rembrandt and other artists in the Achenbach Foundation collection at the Legion of Honor Museum. They influence his own engravings.
Now to the present: Hardy, with a 50-year-career as an artist behind him, donates more than 150 works to the Achenbach, whose curator, Karin Breuer, organizes an exhibit for him (expanded to more than 300 objects) at the Legion’s sister museum, the de Young.
“I could never dream of this — it’s like ‘This is Your Life,'” Hardy said at the opening of the show, which runs through Oct. 6. It’s a tribute, he said, to the Art Institute, and his mentors in the traditional art world, and also to “the old bandits and pirates beyond the fringes of society.”
For all the paintings and lithographs that fill out Hardy’s retrospective, at the heart are his tattoos. They’re shown in printed “flash” design sheets, full-body photographs and projections. The exhibit curator said she had to be convinced Hardy’s tattoos could function as artwork. “I think he’s proven it,” she said.
Hardy’s art-school training was only a start. He got one of his first tattoos from the legendary Phil Sparrow in Oakland, who introduced him to a book on Japanese tattooing. He met Honolulu-based tattooer “Sailor Jerry” Collins and in the 1970s studied in Gifu, Japan — not art, but the art of tattooing. All of which brings a heady mix of East and West to Hardy’s work.
Serpents, panthers and bats intermingle with surfing red devils in the de Young galleries. There are paintings on boogie boards and on a 500-foot-long scroll (“2000 Dragons”) that winds through one full gallery. “My Blue Muse” is inspired by 19th-century Japanese prints, updated with a demon riding a surfboard, striking a Yakuza gangster pose.
“Wear your Dreams” — that’s the theme of another gallery with designs and photos of full-body tattoos. One depicts a vibrant Joan of Arc, the “maid of Orleans,” that Hardy did for a woman from New Orleans. Another, with cranes and chrysanthemums against a bamboo lattice, looks like a Japanese fable filling a tattooed person’s back.
The “Ed Hardy Brand” is here too, T-shirts and socks and a tote bag, mass produced after Hardy licensed many of his designs to fashion merchandiser Christian Audigier in 2004. Hardy was able to retire from active tattooing a few years later.
But his designs live on. The de Young gift shop, among its show-themed merchandise, features packs of five small temporary tattoos for $19. For the “Tattoo Parlour” and “Skull & Bones” body sprays, you’ll have to check online.
If Ed Hardy looked for inspiration among 19th-century Japanese images, we can too, in a superb collection from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston now on view at the Asian Art Museum, through Aug. 18.
“Tattoos in Japanese Prints” may be a mundane title, but the exhibit displays more than 60 works that resemble a wall-to-wall graphic novel. Tattooed men (and at least one woman) battle demons, bandits and each other. These are dynamic characters in vivid color and high drama. All that’s missing are the dialogue balloons with “Aaaarrrrghhh” and “Thonk!”
A craze for full-body tattoos swept Japan’s cities in the 19th century following publication of a set of prints by artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, inspired by a 14th century Chinese martial-arts novel. The sets of prints were best-sellers.
Kabuki theater actors, for their onstage dramas, wore “temporary” tattoos, skin-tight bodysuits painted with elaborate designs, because they’d need to play other roles as well. (The tattooed images were distributed like fan magazines and photos would be a century later).
The characters in the dramatic scenes are fascinating. There is a sumo wrestler tattooed with a waterfall and peonies, a priest-turned-bandit, a thief who disguises himself as a woman, and commoners defending townspeople against bullying samurai.
Tattoos of dragons, eagles and tigers are meant to give extra power to these fighters and defenders. In contrast, the first print at the exhibit’s entrance shows a courtesan tattooing her name on the arm of her lover as he grimaces in pain.
The Asian Art Museum brings this into the present, as well — with an estimate that about 45 million Americans have at least one tattoo. Museum director Jay Xu notes, “This exhibition underscores how the popular culture of late Edo-period Japan continues to influence how we express ourselves today.”
The museum staff also carries the subject into the Bay Area with photo-and-text profiles of seven local tattoo practitioners and color images of their work. Some avoid calling themselves “tattoo artist,” preferring “tattooer,” the text explains, “a term that speaks to both the working class roots and the craft aspect of the profession.”
Included are Takahiro Kitamura of San Jose’s State of Grace tattoos and Junko “Junii” Shimada of San Francisco’s Diamond Tattoo. Shimada grew up in Japan, where tattoos were a taboo subject, especially for a woman. But now, she says, “This job brings me closest to having mind, spirit and body as one.”
‘ED HARDY: DEEPER THAN SKIN’
Through: Oct. 6; 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
Where: de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
Tickets: $13-$28; 415-750-3600, deyoung.famsf.org
‘TATTOOS IN JAPANESE PRINTS’
Through: Aug. 18; 10 a.m.-5 pm. Tuesday-Wednesday and Friday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday
Where: Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St., San Francisco
Tickets: $20-$25; 415-581-3500, www.asianart.org
