Marilyn

Marilyn brings the Marilyn Monroe icon — already filtered through Warhol's silkscreen treatment — into the mokuhanga tradition, an explicitly cross-cultural and cross-medium gesture characteristic of Kristensen's contemporary sensibility. The subject lends itself to the flat color planes and bold outline that registered woodblock printing produces: a portrait built from a key block holding the linework and successive color blocks laying down hair, skin and lips as discrete tonal areas, hand-pulled with [baren](/glossary/baren) on [washi](/glossary/washi). Where Warhol's Marilyns relied on the slippage of misregistered screens for their effect, mokuhanga's much tighter registration with kentō notches yields a quieter, more deliberate image, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations possible across cheek or background. The print belongs to Kristensen's wider strategy of taking material that sits firmly within Western pop iconography and rendering it through Japanese craft tradition — a reverse direction from his Tokyo Tower series, which instead took Western or contemporary subject matter (the tower itself a French-influenced structure) and inserted it into a classical Japanese compositional framework.