His then-fresh florescent palette and riffs on pop culture hit the button of something that was going on in the culture, the hunger for intense and ecstatic experiences-but it didn’t much outlive that cultural moment. Max was immensely popular in the 1960s, famous enough to appear on the Tonight Show and on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “Portrait of the Artist as a Very Rich Man.” He exploited developments in commercial color printing to become a king of dorm-room posters. But put it this way: He’s probably less a new-model Andy Warhol than a new-model Peter Max. Is KAWS an artist for the ages? Any artist who works with appropriated pop culture is going to be compared to Andy Warhol. I personally love Pinocchio and so this piece stood out to me. This piece is the Pinocchio character from a beloved kid’s story about a boy whose nose grows whenever he lies. Maybe it’s just not meant to be looked at that closely and mined for detail-level pleasures in that way. He is an American graffiti artist who is known for his intricate paintings, toys, and prints. ![]() What to do with such trivial observations? Maybe the painting’s shallowness deliberately evokes the expedient simplicity of animation cells (Donnelly worked as an animator in the ‘90s, on Nickelodeon’s Doug among other shows). There are copious examples of his Companion character, his most familiar invention: a grey, skull-headed Mickey Mouse-ish creature, produced at scales ranging from collectible vinyl figurines to the brobdingnagian versions of the slouching creature, meticulously crafted in wood, that greet you in the museum lobby.ĭetail of KAWS, Tide (2020). Then there are his paintings, featuring images of ‘80s and ‘90s American cartoon characters like the Smurfs and the Simpsons with their eyes crossed out-his signature motif. It begins with a case of photos of KAWS’s ‘90s graffiti next to a few examples of his “subvertisements,” urban interventions for which he inserted his own cartoon graphics into ads displayed around the city. It’s a show for the fans-the many, many KAWS fans. ![]() He also worked on the children’s animations ‘101 Dalmations’, ‘Daria’ and ‘Doug’. He studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York before working as a freelance animator at Disney. They could have wasted a lot more time making overblown claims about the work’s profundity to try to justify its significance before the gaze of skeptics like myself. KAWS KAWS (real name Brian Donnelly) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. ![]() The Brooklyn Museum show, “ KAWS: WHAT PARTY,” does a good job taking KAWS seriously but not too seriously.
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