TAKASHI MURAKAMI

On view are 121 canvases that Murakami produced in response to Hiroshige’s series of ukiyo-e prints 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), which captures life in a city on the precipice of change. Murakami’s interpretations, to which he has added elements of other ukiyo-e works alongside his own characters, were first shown alongside the historical prints at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024 and prompt consideration of Hiroshige’s influential worldview.

Also featured are Murakami’s new reworkings of European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that were also inspired by Japanese originals in the context of Japonisme, a movement in European art and design sparked by the reopening of Japan to global trade in 1853. The term, likely coined by critic Philippe Burty in 1872, denotes an aesthetic rediscovery that profoundly affected modern painting. Many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists were exposed to Japanese woodblock prints at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. Struck by the works’ combination of realist subject matter with pictorial flatness, asymmetrical composition, and brilliant color, they began to explore related styles in their own painting. As a Japanese artist, Murakami reclaims these images to bring the process of influence full circle.

Among the works that Murakami interprets—alongside those of Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Hishikawa Morofusa, and Kitagawa Utamaro—is James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75). This image echoes the nocturnal subject and boldly cropped composition of Hiroshige’s Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge (1857); the flat color found in woodblock prints may also have prompted its restricted palette and simplified forms. Reportedly, Whistler discovered Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom in London, an encounter whose cross-cultural essence encapsulates the initial emergence of Japonisme and its fascination to Murakami. Finally, several new paintings reflect on the origin of the French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton’s logo in the traditional Japanese family crest or kamon, and its Damier (checkerboard) design in the Japanese Ichimatsu pattern.

An expanded version of Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, a major exhibition that originated at The Broad, Los Angeles, in 2022, is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from May 25 to September 7, 2025.