Murakami In Versailles

When Marc Jacobs, creative director for Louis Vuitton, collaborated with the art world’s celebrated painter and sculptor, Takashi Murakami, the result was a hive’s worth of buzz. Murakami transformed the company’s LV logo into a multi-color riot of cartoon-eye designs on a white sterile background. Needless to say, the artist suddenly found himself fashion’s latest it-boy in Paris. The rest is fashion retail history. Not unlike Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami picks up low culture and tweaks it for the “high-art” market. The end products are often innovative and forward-moving design concepts.
It took ten years before the French government honored him with another major exhibition, the last ones at the Fundacion Cartier and the Emmanuel Perrotin gallery. In the fall 2010, the most discussed art exhibit had to be the “Murakami in Versailles.”
When the artist was asked what Versailles conjured for him, Takashi Murakami was quoted as saying, “For us (the Japanese) the Palace is both a symbol of Western history and a dream world with its own aesthetics.” In effect the artist creates tension between two cultures: the high and low, the superficial and the profound.
Versailles belonged to a particular moment in French history and was conceived by the French monarchy as the solution to its political problems. It was meant as a symbol of the glory of the French monarchial system. It was fitting and right that the Palace of Louis XIV should reveal its inexhaustible novelty and not become another relic of a worn past. To Murakami, the Palace itself is a site of such decorative elements that it is three-dimensional in nature. In a sense, the Japanese artist gave the chateau a breath of new life.
It’s in the Hall of Mirrors where Louis the King was painted by artist Le Brun in an epic narrative of the glories of monarchy. The King is depicted in a tableau leading the French crossing of the Rhine River in 1672. Dressed like a Roman god with hair streaming, he holds a thunderbolt projectile sitting in a silver chariot pushed by Hercules. In contrast, Murakami’s sculpture, “Flower Matango,” which graces the fabled room, depicts in fiber glass, acrylic and iron a character which appears in a film done by the makers of Godzilla. It’s painted in an explosion of garish pop colors.
The whole audacity of the sculptural piece looks stunning in the Hall of Mirrors, a confectionary of unabashedly glorified Louis XIV’s reign. The effect is both dissonant and harmonious as Murakami’s artwork is set against a European tradition of perspective and abandons subject in favor of color. The artist’s initial goal was indeed to weave his personal Japanese identity into the fabric of Versailles creating a new chemical reaction for the viewers.
Louis XIV believed in the principle of an open palace. He wrote in his memoirs, “ If there is anything singular about French monarchy, it is the free and easy access which subjects have to their prince.” These days the Chateau de Versailles and its gardens constitute the most breathtaking cultural heritages of France. And indeed one of its patrimonial missions is to enhance it and to keep it available to the public. And by introducing a rich and varied artistic program, the chateau is brought back to life. Murakami declared that from a technical standpoint, he was locked in a battle with one of the world’s most difficult installation sites.