The New York Times

By Motoko Rich

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. 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. As he cowered in the grass, a young woman in a red dress appeared, only her upper body visible. And then suddenly, a fighter plane shot her, blasting her into the air. In slow motion, she fell back to the ground. Tanaami, recounting the memory decades later, said he even glimpsed the pilot in the cockpit as the plane flew across the field.

It turns out none of this happened. While Tanaami, now 86, did experience multiple Allied bombings during the war, he concocted that particular memory of terror in the field. 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.

“When I thought about it, I realized, ‘Of course that couldn’t have happened,’” said Tanaami, whose current show, “Manhattan Universe,” is on view at the gallery Venus Over Manhattan in New York through October 8. “I have a lot of memories like that,” he said. “I think those created memories are more vivid than the real ones.”

Tanaami’s recollections, both actual and imagined, have animated decades of paintings, sculptures, collages and films in which images of American fighter jets, bursting bombs, streaming blood and screeching roosters sounding alarms of impending disaster recur in surreal Technicolor mash-ups. Even as he blends native arts of Japan — such as ukiyo-e woodblock painting and manga — with American pop iconography including Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse and superheroes, it is the singular trauma of the war that informs his work most consistently. Tanaami said he is still haunted by visions of dead bodies and bleeding victims lying in the streets, as his mother tried to cover his eyes to shelter him from the carnage. “Of course that kind of trauma has stayed within me,” he said. “It is still there.”

Born in 1936 to a textile shop owner and a homemaker, Tanaami grew up during the United States occupation of Japan, imbibing a heavy dose of American culture. He would watch as many as 500 movies a year, most of them Hollywood productions. Particularly transfixing were Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” which unleashed Mickey Mouse upon the world, and horror films where young women were rescued from the clutches of monsters.

After studying design at Musashino Art University in western Tokyo, he took a job in advertising to satisfy his parents, who feared he could never make a living as an artist. It was so boring, he said, that after two years “there was nothing to do but quit.” He went on to work in the editorial design departments of magazines, eventually taking over as the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy in the 1970s. He also designed album covers for bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Monkees.

Inspired in part by the work of Andy Warhol, who also got his start in commercial design, Tanaami realized that the techniques he had honed professionally could seed more personal artwork. In the 1960s, he started making silk-screen prints, oil paintings, ink drawings and collages, often featuring nude images of women. “It might be a generational thing,” he said, noting the proliferation of pornographic magazines he saw at the time, both in Japan and on visits to New York.

Signs of his commercial roots clutter the modest apartment that serves as his studio, with skateboards, greeting cards, mugs, flip-flops, soccer balls and sweatshirts imprinted with images from his artwork strewn across several rooms. He still occasionally takes commissions: He showed off a limited edition, 1,000,000 yen (about $7,000) Moncler down jacket on which he had painted a multicolored figure with an oversize skull and a visible skeleton, variations of which appear in many of his paintings.

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. Speaking as if slightly bemused by his fame, he showed no signs of flagging energy even after two hours of talking.

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. His studio, which sits just across the hall from the apartment he shares with his wife, is crammed full of the reimagined Picasso canvases, including one where he superimposed the face of “Astro Boy” — a robot character invented by his childhood hero, the Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka — onto the face of the child in Picasso’s original. “At first I thought I would draw 10 and stop,” Tanaami said, but he kept going until he had produced close to 400. Before he started, he “didn’t especially like Picasso,” he said. “But as I was painting work inspired by him, I came to love him.” Here, Tanaami answer’s T’s Artist’s Questionnaire.

What’s the first work you ever sold, and for how much?

The first significant work I sold was at Nanzuka Gallery — or was it the Tokyo Art Fair? There were two pieces of mine and they both sold together. That gallery had just opened and hadn’t sold any pieces yet. It was the very first day the gallery displayed pieces for sale, and mine were sold out right away. And I thought, “Wow, my art sells?” I realized it for the first time.

When you start a new piece, where do you begin — what’s the first step?

It depends on whether it’s a print, painting or sculpture. I think of the idea first. For instance, if I want to make a film, I would make the storyboard first.