Daughter of Art History

Since the eighties, Yasumasa Morimura has been invading the canon of Western art—offering both wry commentary and loving tribute—by replacing the figures and faces of its masterpieces with his own. After painstakingly recreating the surroundings of some of the world’s most iconic paintings, Morimura assumes their subjects’ identities through elaborate makeup and costume and inserts himself into the scene.

Daughter of Art History includes a foreword by art historian Donald Kuspit, who describes Morimura’s art as “a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which painting, sculpture, and photography form a seamless conceptual whole. His photographs may be mock masterpieces, but they are nonetheless masterpieces, for they show mastery of three mediums usually regarded as irreconcilable.”