Octopus painting
![octopus painting octopus painting](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BUOj2FZkkRE/maxresdefault.jpg)
"The Urotsukidoji anime series was created by Toshio Maeda in 1986 and released in America in 1992 by Anime 18. As to the recent history of so-called tentacle rape imagery, it's hard to top the matter-of-fact tone of this paragraph from the Wikipedia article, "Hentai." Murakami's sculptures are no more louche than the popular hentai imagery in comics, videos, video games, and websites. The Western art world knows hentai largely via Takashi Murakami and works such as Miss Ko2 and My Lonesome Cowboy (the pictured sculpture, featured in MOCA's "© Murakami", made $15.2 million in a 2008 Sotheby's auction).
There it mostly falls under the rubric of hentai, the naughty brand of anime. As a pop-culture trope, sex with octopus has probably never been more prevalent than it is in today's Japan. Not unlike the world of Mad Men, modern Japanese culture blends the button-down salaryman with the libidinous rake. The title of the James Bond flick, Octopussy, barely made it past censors, and the 1990 film Henry and June incurred the first-ever NC-17 rating because it showed the female lead looking at a postcard of the Hokusai print.
![octopus painting octopus painting](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71kTP8ZA2OS._AC_SL1500_.jpg)
To many Westerners, any representation of a woman coupling with an octopus will be pornographic. A Diving Girl and Octopus, attributed to the Kikugawa family, mid 19th-century, is notable for the post-coital face on the octopus. The Bushnell netsuke collection has several related pocket sculptures, all probably post-dating the Hokusai print. Perhaps the message is, tentacles are better than men. The woman is enjoying herself more than the octopuses are. Hokusai's version is not only more "sensual" (as Cooper describes it) but more feminist (as no one on Mad Men would think to describe it). There's no indication that the woman wants the mollusc's attentions. Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus by Katsukawa Shusho, above, is more understated than Hokusai's orgy. LACMA has a rare pre-Hokusai woodcut of the theme from c. It's found in netsuke of the 17th century, and its inventor is unknown. But Hokusai didn't invent the motif of woman having sex with octopus. The octopus print, from 1814, is usually known in the English-speaking world as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. There's no mystery about the creator of Cooper's print: It's Katsushika Hokusai, otherwise known for The Great Wave. Gloating over the acquisition, Cooper asks, "Who is the man who imagined her ecstasy?"Īrt historians are still asking that question. Cooper's most recherché prize, revealed on the third season's opening episode, is a print of a woman being ravished by two octopuses. He's an Ayn Rand-reading Japanophile who covets Rothko as well as traditional Asian art. That's founding partner Bert Cooper, played by Robert Morse. Not only are the Sterling Cooper offices a wet dream of mid-century modern design, but one of the characters is an art collector.
OCTOPUS PAINTING TV
Mad Men is one of the few TV series in which the creators know something about art (unlike, say, Work of Art).