Ed Hardy is a soft-spoken, keen observer of nature and the human species, and while there is delight in viewing his colorful cavalcade, it's gratifying to know how he takes pleasure in the whole big creative process. Speaking in praise of the print as the democratization of art, he attests to its inclusive commonality. The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, named for the family who donated their collection of art on paper, was a place of research and refuge for the young Ed Hardy. In turn, he followed other benefactors, including Ed Ruscha, who donated their works on paper to this department. His gift was the catalyst for the upcoming Deeper than Skin exhibit, opening at the de Young museum Thursday, July 11, 2019. I spoke with Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach, who not only broke the news about the Ed Hardy acquisition, but now gets to unfurl the Dragon Scroll.

Gwynned Vitello: Was it a stretch to make a case to present a retrospective of a tattoo artist at the de Young museum?
Karin Breuer: Yes and no. We have 115,000 works of art on paper in this collection, including a lot of what some people might not really consider to be art. However, two years ago we presented the Summer of Love exhibition with all the music posters that this department collected 1967 through 1970 when they were being produced. This museum has always had a history of being very progressive about the way it collects, and Ed Hardy was no stranger to us, as he might have told you.


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He came here several times as a student at the Art Institute, right?
He came at the urging of his professor Gordon Cooke and he looked at old master prints that one of the curators brought out for him. It was in the 80s, when I first started, that he came in to look at Japanese prints, in particular. I know he looked at a lot of dragon imagery, and that may have been an inspiration for tattoos, or for his own art that he was engaged in at the time. But I just knew of him as a cool guy who dressed like a college professor and was well known as a tattoo artist.

I guess he doesn't give off the stereotypical appearance of a tattooist, whatever that is supposed to like.
So, out of the blue, in 2017, Ed either emailed or called, and we had a little walk down memory lane. And he said that he was thinking of offering all of his prints to us. I told him how fantastic that would be and later took a visit to his studio to survey what he had in mind to donate. Here he was connecting with the Achenbach, saying it “was so important to my development as an artist.” I almost had tears coming from my eyes in thinking that, “Yes, yes, it actually does work. People do pay attention to what we do here and it matters!”

That's so great, it's a really important part of this story.
There are people here in San Francisco and tourists who know all about Ed Hardy, but not very much about his fine art practice. And seeing Ed's enthusiasm, I pitched it to our exhibitions director, not thinking she would leap on it right away but she did, and in fact said, “Not only would I like you to do this show, but can you do it for next summer?”

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What a great opportunity, especially as some people don't know much more him than the clothing line.
Yes, they know that, and they know about some of the imagery which is all pretty much form his early days, from the 60s and 70s. What they don't know a lot about is how he innovated with Japanese designs and motifs and how he changed the face of tattooing by becoming an “appointment only shop” where he worked actively with the client in developing their idea and working with their body type.

I didn't know there was a time when the predominant method was to just choose something from a wall!
He'll say, “I did thousands of U.S. Marine Corps tattoos, thousands of panthers and snakes.” But it was his idea to introduce Japanese themes. In fact, he was the first American tattooist to go to Japan and learn from a Japanese master.

Can you tell me what characterizes the Japanese elements?
He looked at Japanese Ukiyo-e Era prints by Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Hiroshige. He was also inspired by images he saw there like samurai warriors, demons and warrior types.

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Lots of demons, right?
Right, and the dragon comes out of that. It's very big in Japanese culture, and he told me the difference between Asian and Western styles. Our dragons have wings and feet, and the Japanese often sort of slither as if they have legs; they're, I guess, more lizard-like.

I thought one of the reasons he moved to Hawaii was because of the tattoo tradition, but he said that was not really his style.
He and another artist named Leo Zulueta innovated on the so-called “tribal tattoo” by doing a mashup where Western meets the Pacific Islands style, and up comes a new hybrid that he called New Tribalism. He wrote about this in one of his tattoo magazines.

I imagine the dragon scroll will be the highlight, but I'd like to know more about how the show will be installed.
It will be downstairs at the de Young and take up a good, ten thousand square feet. We're going to start with the little toy tattoo parlor he set up. It's really fun, and you'll see that it makes perfect sense in his development because he was looking at this old school imagery that he saw in the tattoo parlors in Long Beach, and many of them were lifetime inspirations.

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So this will be fairly chronological?
Definitely in the first part of the show. We go from childhood to high school to the Art Institute here in San Francisco, and we'll show examples of that work in pretty rapid transition. Then we get to the late 60s and 70s when he had this long learning curve of experience with apprenticeships and practicing at tattoo parlors all up and down the West Coast. We'll have a whole wall of his tattoo flash with some interactive experiences where people can zero in on particular tattoo designs on various flash sheets.

I guess, because of his appointment only method, I didn't realize he had his own tattoo flash.
He did, and he's kept it all. In fact, his mother kept all of his childhood drawings, and he or she kept a lot of the high school and college art. He kept an awful lot of his flash because he worked in so many cities in different parlors. His flash was like his portfolio. It gets mounted on the wall of the studio, and I would say that it was his calling card. And, you know, it has the patina of age, being exposed to the atmosphere of the parlors, so they're not all pristine. That's what makes them so wonderful to look at.

What other artifacts will you have?
We'll show the shop t-shirts from the 60s and the photocopied flyers, which were the way to advertise in those days. They're really fun. We have business cards, as well as some designs he did in Japan, including designs based on that experience.

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Your associate, Shaquille Heath, advises that you'll be showing prints he made as a student, as well as works from the Fine Art Museum's collections in order to show the influences.
Yes, we're going to hang them side by side in the show; for example, a Rembrandt self-portrait next to one of Hardy's. There's a Morandi still-life next to a Hardy still-life, as well as a landscape by a 19th century French eccentric named Rodolphe Bresdin next to one of Ed's. I think it will be startling to our audience to see how he was a typical young student, studying art history and borrowing the good ideas to incorporate into his own works.

So it doesn't sound as though you'll have any problems filling that big space.
Oh now, there are over 300 objects, and it's jam-packed. The next section will really please tattoo aficionados, where we show preparatory drawings for his private commissions, along with photographs of a client's body with the actual tattoo. People have been very generous in letting him photograph the finished tattoos, though, of course, and we don't see faces in many of them. We'll see fat bellies and shapely waists, and it will be a lot of fun.

This will be a room of photographs?
Photographs, yes, but also the preparatory drawings that he kept. He would work with a client on a drawing, color it in and make his presentation, saying, “Okay, this is what we talked about. What do you like? What don't you like?" These drawings are gorgeous. They are on tracing paper, so we sandwich them in plexiglass so people can distinguish that he doesn't consider these fine art, that the work of art is on the body. We hope people will get that. At this point, we start to show the chronology of the image through time and maybe in his mind. We talk about where these images come from in our didactic labels. We do this with devils, tigers, the magic trickster fox and an old-school WW1 tattoo, a Red Cross nurse image, called The Rose of No Man's Land. And the butterfly woman is a classic traditional tattoo where the wings are very colorful and center around a beautiful woman's face. Then, of course, I have a big section of skulls and skeletons.

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Do you have any of the porcelain pieces?
They're some of my favorite things, what I would steal from the show if I could! These are traditional vase forms, I think, maybe three different designs. And instead of the traditional Japanese blue and white, he's done a dragon, tiger, gorilla or one of these red demons. They are so super cool. Only by coincidence, the most recent work is in the last gallery.

Okay, dragon scroll!
We just unrolled it the other day, this five hundred foot scroll that he did to commemorate the Year of the Dragon in 2000. There are two thousand dragons, each one carefully numbered in Chinese characters. It's tremendously colorful, and you might not guess how automatic. As a tattoo artist, he works very fast.

How will it be hung, against what color backdrop?
The walls in there will probably be black because it going to be suspended from the ceiling, and kind of meander through the room in a kind of loop. But no one will get lost in it as it will be at about nose level and very crowd friendly. It's on the material they use for Fed Ex envelopes called Tybek. We already bought a roll so we can play with it and destroy it with all our bad ideas before the real one goes up.

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He had worked on it for about 52 days over six months. And we'll play selections we put together from a soundtrack he offered. We have this great playlist with everything from Van Morrison, to The Clash, to The Beatles, to The Gyuto Monks of Tibet and Handel's Water Music.

As I get to know more about Ed, I am so impressed by how much he appreciates process and preparation. And I'm including his reverence for art history and affection for books from his childhood.
I even observed the other day that, even in these prep drawings, he likes the materials he used as a kid, a black ink pen and colored pencils. I think he finds them comfortable to work with, it's a natural thing, and they do the trick! There's a specific nib he likes to use, and as you know, the nib can be used for thick or thin lines. And then, the colored pencils can be dipped in water and become a kind of watercolor pencil.

I remember him saying that wherever he was he wanted to incorporate new things he was learning, but realized he could not distance himself from the past. And that he would embrace it.
So this may be a very important art experience, especially for young kids. It's kind of, like, yeah, things that you latch onto as a kid can be with you the rest of your life.

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And that you can love and respect many art forms and cultures.
There's also the fact that the tattoo world isn't what a lot of older people think it is this sort of tawdry, dark underworld, where the only people who get tattoos are criminals and drunk sailors. But this will be fun. We'll have two interactives; a flash selection and a big image of him on an interactive screen in the same pose of his student print called “Future Plans.” You can touch one of these tattoos, give him a poke and the tattoo will come up on the monitor and tell who did the tattoo and why it's important to Ed (and his body!)

You know this exhibit is about a really nice person who appreciates the people and surroundings that have supported him. His gives so much credit to his Mom and his wife Francesca.
He's guided by a personal passion and always has been.  

Experience Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin at the de Young museum, July 13–October 6. Got ink? Your tattoo gets you discounted tickets, for a limited time only. Learn more at deyoungmuseum.org.