SHARING WITH ME

This poster which I had seen in Art Magazines, intrigued me. Naturally I knew nothing about the artist but it was on my priority list to go to the Japanese Cultural Institute and see his work. Even more important as my major trip for the year was to go to Japan with Laurent and Jerome. Paul Jacoulet (1896–1960) was a French, Japan-based woodblock print artist known for a style that mixed the traditional ukiyo-e and techniques developed by the artist himself. He was born in Paris in 1896 and lived in Japan for most of his life. During World War II, he moved to Karuizawa, where he survived in the countryside by growing vegetables and raising poultry. Jacoulet prints are rare and often sell in the $5,000 to $20,000 range. His  creative period was 1939-1960. He was considered one of the few western artists to have mastered the art of woodblock printing sufficiently to be recognized in Japan. His works are almost all of people, either portraits or full body images capturing some b

Laurent and Jerome had showed me some of their pictures taken at the Murakami exhibition. I was somewhat surprised as they didn’t look much like the artist I knew. Must look at that and so I did. There was nothing I could find on Internet to explain what this work was about. Nor was there anything at the Gallery Perrotin. However, I enjoy going to this gallery as the space is beautiful. Murakami who is only 54, lives and works between Tokyo, Japan and New York. On the first floor, we are greeted by a series of new triptychs and diptychs conceived by Murakami as homage to the painter Francis Bacon, alongside recognizable sculpture pieces from the artist’s catalogue like “Dragon Heads – Gold.” When I had see the photo of this before going to the exhibition, it was the triptych which was easily recognizable as Bacon but certainly less « a look alike » of Lucien Freud. Hommage to Francis Bacon ( George Dyer) - 2016 Hommage to Francis Bacon (Lucien Freud) - 2016 Up