See How Don Ed Hardy Pioneered Modern Tattoo Art At This New De Young Museum Retrospective

When Don Ed Hardy set up his first tattoo shop, he took some precautions. The first was to work under an alias. The second was to move to Vancouver, a thousand miles from his San Francisco home, in order to ensure that when he matured and opened a shop in the Bay Area, he wouldn't have to see his embarrassing journeyman work loitering on the sidewalk.

Hardy's precautions were understandable, not only because the tattoos he inked in the late 1960s were amateurish approximations of standard sailor motifs, but also because he had ambitions to make American tattoo art as sophisticated as Japanese irezumi. Following a circuitous path that brought him to Japan as the first American to apprentice for an irezumi master, Hardy ultimately succeeded in creating his own distinct aesthetic. Deeper Than Skin, a new exhibition opening this weekend at San Francisco's De Young Museum, shows his inventiveness and skill, making the case that Hardy was a pivotal figure in bringing tattoo art from the margins of society to the mainstream.

Hardy's education was highly unusual for a tattooer of his era. In the early '60s, he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, taking classes with notable Bay Area Figurative artists including Joan Brown and Manual Neri, and apprenticing with the printmaker Gordon Cook. On the basis of his talent, he was offered a graduate fellowship at the Yale University School of Art. A trip across the Bay to the tattoo studio of Phil Sparrow – who inked him and exposed him to irezumi – convinced him that his time would be better spent practicing his art on the human body.

It was the unprecedented combination of formal art training, immersion in the American folk tradition of Sparrow and Sailor Jerry, and study abroad with the Japanese master Horihide, that distinguished Hardy from all three. It may also have been the fact that he respected these forebears equally. As he explained in an interview with de Young curator Karin Breuer, "very few tattooers had a formal art education, but a lot of them had natural ability and developed terrific styles. They were naïve and weren’t sullied by too much art education; they just pursued what they thought was right." What could easily have been mere appropriation, and resulted in superficial eclecticism, gained authority through Hardy's triple apprenticeship and multilayered commitment to his craft.

A genuine desire to collaborate with clients further contributed to the style Hardy pioneered, beginning with an appointment-only studio he established in San Francisco in 1974. "It seemed absurd that someone wishing to be tattooed had to select an image codified in the current folk-art tradition," Hardy told Breuer. And it seemed equally improbable to him that his art would mature if he worked alone in a studio.

The body of work that ensued most likely did help to bring tattoos from the docks into prep schools and boardrooms. Museum exhibitions lent tattoos the credibility of 'high' art, while celebrity endorsements provided mass visibility. (Hardy's critically-acclaimed 1995 exhibition at New York's Drawing Center and a 2007 photograph of Madonna in a Hardy t-shirt aptly bookend this trajectory.)

Nevertheless there is a schism between the art form developed by Hardy and the popularity it engendered. His most significant work, the corporeal equivalent of a mural or fresco, bears scant resemblance to the innocuously decorative markings that provide a suburban surrogate for rebellion. Not that everybody could have Hardy's virtuoso artwork inked on their skin. Hardy is now retired, and there was never more than one of him. Hardy's most important legacy is not to be found in the number of people going under the needle. Far more significant is his contribution to leveling distinctions, helping to create an American milieu for creative tattoo art.

When Hardy turned down Yale to become a tattooer, SFAI instructors griped that he'd shunned avant-garde art for "bastardized sailortown craft". Half a century later, Hardy's most extreme work looks more avant-garde – and has certainly had greater influence – than the bulk of self-consciously avant-garde paintings and sculptures.