The End of a Partnership: Yokoo Tadanori’s Last Poster for Tenjo Sajiki

In 1967, an advertisement appeared in a Japanese magazine with the headline: ‘Recruiting Extraordinary Performers, Freaks, Dwarves, Giants, Beauties, and More!’ Who would have thought what sounded like a freak show’s talent scout would mark the birth of an avant-garde art collective? In the same year, the multifaceted Terayama Shuji—poet, writer, film director, and commentator of equestrian and boxing competitions all in one—expanded his creative endeavours to theatre and formed the experimental troupe ‘Tenjo Sajiki’.

Through photographer Hosoe Eikoh, graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori was introduced to Terayama, and for a while, the two were thick as thieves and met nearly every day. It was natural, then, that Yokoo became one of the sixteen founding members of Tenjo Sajiki. He was in charge of the stage and poster design of the troupe’s first three plays: The Hunchback of Aomori, The Crime of Fatso Oyama, and La Marie-Vison. Among them, the poster of La Marie-Vison (Mary in Furs) deserves particular scrutiny with its intertextual design.

Before looking at the poster of La Marie-Vison, it is probably necessary to be acquainted with the French literary and art magazine La Revue Blanche as Yokoo directly imitated the magazine’s 1894 poster drawn by French post-impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard’s monochromic poster features three silhouettes, including a lady in fur holding a copy of La Revue Blanche, believed to be Misia Sert, then wife of Thadée Natanson, a founder of the magazine. She was also the muse of artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Beside the lady is a young boy dressed as a newsboy pointing at the magazine with a thumbs-up gesture; behind him, a man is at a newsstand, his hunched back facing the viewer. The description above also applies to Yokoo’s La Marie-Vison poster, except the newsstand is gone, and the lady has exchanged her copy of La Revue Blanche for a playful apology letter, which reads: ‘To Your Excellency Pierre Bonnard, kindly forgive my infringement of your work. Tanadori Yokoo.’ At the poster’s bottom right, Yokoo pays another homage to Bonnard by blatantly signing ‘Pierre Yokoo’ instead of his romanised name, ‘Tadanori Yokoo’, in the manner of his previous posters.

What was the reason behind Yokoo’s appropriation of Bonnard’s work?

First of all, the composition of the trio in the poster is closely analogous to the plot of La Marie-Vison. Adapted from Arthur Lee Kopit’s 1960 play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, La Marie-Vison tells the story of a mother imprisoning her son and manipulating his life. Though absent, the father makes his presence known from time to time. While the father watches the plot unfolds as a corpse in Kopit’s version, the father (or, more accurately, adoptive father) in Terayama’s play assumes a maternal role by cross-dressing. In other words, the protagonist of La Marie-Vison is androgynous, ostensibly feminine, yet practically masculine. In Bonnard’s poster, the lady and the newsboy occupy the most prominent position in the centre and fully face the viewer. The man, however, is on the right with his back to the audience, melted into a black mass—is this not an exact rendition of La Marie-Vison? Marie disguises herself as a woman and shoulders the responsibility of a mother (one may interpret the newsboy as an adoptive son). At the same time, male identity lurks in the dark like a lingering shadow.

Furthermore, the woman in the poster is cloaked in fur, which mirrors the name ‘La Marie-Vison’, but the way she dons the coat implicitly divulges the character’s ambiguous identity.

While the woman’s eyes and nose are exposed, the mouth and neck are concealed by fur, so any innate masculine features, such as a beard or Adam’s apple, would be hidden from view, paralleling Marie’s androgynous, gender-fluid identity. Summarising the two points above, Yokoo’s referencing of Bonnard’s La Revue Blanche poster for La Marie-Vison makes for a perfect match.

In a turn of events, Yokoo had a huge argument with the director Higashi Yutaka at a rehearsal of La Marie-Vison and withdrew from the troupe in the heat of the fight. It remains unknown who was in the right in their altercation, but one thing is for certain: this poster is the last work Yokoo ever designed for Tenjo Sajiki, and it signalled the end of a dream partnership between Yokoo and Terayama.