# Tadanori Yokoo artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/tadanori-yokoo/
Profile generated: 2026-05-16T18:41:04.881Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Birth date: 1936-06-17
- Nationality: Japanese
- Movements: Japanese postwar graphic design and psychedelia
- Common media: posters and graphic design, prints and printmaking, painting, ceramics, digital imaging

## About Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo (born 1936, Nishiwaki, Hyogo, Japan) is a graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker, painter, and ceramicist whose career has spanned more than six decades. Emerging from Japan's postwar design scene in the late 1950s, Yokoo became internationally recognized for a visual language that fuses psychedelia, pop imagery, and traditional Japanese iconography into dense, vividly colored compositions. His poster designs from the 1960s and 1970s helped define an era of experimental graphic art and earned him a place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In later decades he expanded into painting, ceramics, and digital imaging while maintaining an active studio practice. Yokoo's work draws on sources ranging from ukiyo-e to Hollywood film to Indian spiritual imagery, making it a touchstone for collectors interested in the intersection of Japanese visual culture and global pop modernism.

## Common works and media

Screen-printed and offset-lithograph posters, limited-edition serigraphs and woodblock prints, acrylic and oil paintings, ceramic plates and vessels, mixed-media collages, and digital-imaging works. Recurring subjects include self-portraiture, cosmological and spiritual motifs, Japanese folk iconography, and pop-cultural pastiche. Signed and numbered editions exist for many poster series; unsigned or later printings also circulate and should be distinguished from original editions.

## Market and appraisal context

Yokoo's auction footprint includes posters, limited-edition prints, paintings, ceramics, and works on paper. Collectors most frequently encounter his screen-printed and offset-lithograph posters from the 1960s–1980s, which appear regularly at major and regional auction houses. Valuation depends on medium, date, edition size, condition, provenance, and whether the work is from his celebrated psychedelic period. Original paintings and unique ceramics tend to command higher estimates than poster editions. Comparable-lot analysis using realized prices, sale dates, and auction-house provenance is recommended for any individual appraisal.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine independently researched artist identity data with auction records, auction-house context, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots when those records are available. For Tadanori Yokoo, identity and biographical data are drawn from the Museum of Modern Art, the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, Getty ULAN, VIAF, Wikidata, and the artist's official website.

## Sources

- RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/269958
- The Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/artists/6502
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3513688
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/96086073/
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500060125
- Library of Congress: https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79039777
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadanori_Yokoo
- Tadanori Yokoo: http://www.tadanoriyokoo.com/