Yasuo Kuniyoshi
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was a
Japanese-American are Americans of Japanese ancestry. Japanese Americans were among the three largest Asian American ethnic communities during the 20th century; but, according to the 2000 census, they have declined in number to constitute the sixth largest Asia ...
painter, photographer and printmaker.


Biography

Kuniyoshi was born on September 1, 1889 in
Okayama is the capital city of Okayama Prefecture in the Chūgoku region of Japan. The city was founded on June 1, 1889. , the city has an estimated population of 720,841 and a population density of 910 persons per km2. The total area is . The city is ...
, Japan. He immigrated to the United States in 1906, choosing not to attend military school in Japan. Kuniyoshi originally intended to study English and return to Japan to work as a translator. He spent some time in Seattle, before enrolling at the
Los Angeles School of Art and Design LOS, or Los, or LoS may refer to: Science and technology * Length of stay, the duration of a single episode of hospitalisation * Level of service, a measure used by traffic engineers * Level of significance, a measure of statistical significanc ...
.Tatham (2006), p.100 Kuniyoshi spent three years in Los Angeles, discovering his love for the arts. He then moved to New York City to pursue an art career. Kuniyoshi studied briefly at the National Academy and at the Independent School in New York City, and then studied under
Kenneth Hayes Miller Kenneth Hayes Miller (March 11, 1876 – January 1, 1952) was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher. Career Born in Oneida, New York, he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Kenyon Cox, Henry Siddons Mowbray and with Willia ...
at the
Art Students League of New York The Art Students League of New York is an art school at 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may stu ...
. He married his first wife Katherine Schmidt, who in 1919 lost her American citizenship due to her relationship with Kuniyoshi who was ineligible for American citizenship. He later taught at the Art Students League of New York in New York City and in
Woodstock, New York Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States, in the northern part of the county, northwest of Kingston, NY. It lies within the borders of the Catskill Park. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 in 2000 ...
. Nan Lurie was among his students, as was Irene Krugman. Around 1930, the artist built a home and studio on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock. He was an active member of the artistic community there for the rest of his life. One of his pupils from the League, Anne Helioff, would go on to work with him at Woodstock. Although viewed as an immigrant, Kuniyoshi was very patriotic and identified himself as an American. He never received his citizenship due to harsh immigration laws. During World War II, he proclaimed his loyalty and patriotism as a propaganda artist for the United States. This included a number of anti-Japanese propaganda posters. In 1935, Kuniyoshi was awarded the
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
. He was also an Honorary member of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
and first president of Artists Equity Association, now known as New York Artists Equity Association. In 1948, Kuniyoshi became the first living artist chosen to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1952, Kuniyoshi also exhibited at the Venice Biennial. In the early 1950s, Kuniyoshi became sick with cancer, and ended his career as an artist with a series of black-and-white drawings using sumi-e ink. He died on 14 May 1953. He is interred at the Woodstock Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, New York.


Art


Printmaking

Kenneth Hayes Miller introduced Kuniyoshi to intaglio printmaking; he made approximately 45 such prints between 1916 and 1918. One of Kuniyoshi's more popular Intaglio prints is "Bust of a Woman, Head Inclined to the Right," which can be found in the collections of both
The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 F ...
and the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
. In 1922, Kuniyoshi learned about zinc plate lithography and adopted the technique. Kuniyoshi continued making lithographs throughout the remainder of his artistic career.


Painting

Kuniyoshi was also known for his
still-life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, boo ...
paintings of common objects, and figurative subjects like female circus performers and nudes. Throughout Kuniyoshi's career he had frequent changes in his technique and subject matter. In the 1920s, Kuniyoshi painted images that were more angular, somewhat
Cubist Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
in style and with a tilted plane that allowed him to paint the most detail for each object in his paintings. Kuniyoshi's application of Cubism's angularity can be seen in his painting titled ''Little Joe with Cow'' (1923). In these early paintings, Kuniyoshi was painting from a combination of his memory and imagination, which is a Japanese mode of thinking about painting. Instead of painting from life, as in Western painting, traditional Japanese painters typically paint their ideal image of a particular subject. Kuniyoshi combined this with
Western painting The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after ...
in the way he applies the bold colors in oil on canvas; in Japan,
traditional A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or ...
painters use ink on either silk or rice paper. These early paintings are the precursors to his mature style that we see in the 1930s. In 1925, Kuniyoshi painted his ''Circus Girl Resting'', after a visit to Paris. He painted a provocative woman of larger proportions, similar to ''Strong Woman and Child''. This painting was purchased and included in the Advancing American Art Exhibition by the US Department of State alongside other well known modern artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. Due to that era's aversion to modern art, it was closed down. Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl Resting received harsh criticism from President Harry Truman because of its exotic proportions, not because of its provocative nature. In the 1930s Kuniyoshi switched from painting from memory to painting from life. This change occurred after his two trips to Europe in 1925 and 1928, where he was exposed to French modern art. In 1928, Goodrich notes, Kuniyoshi spent most of his time in Paris with his friend
Jules Pascin Julius Mordecai Pincas (March 31, 1885 – June 5, 1930), known as Pascin (; erroneously or ), Jules Pascin, or the "Prince of Montparnasse", was a Bulgarian artist known for his paintings and drawings. He later became an American citizen ...
, and it was on this later trip that Kuniyoshi realized that his art had grown stale. By switching to painting from life and incorporating perspective into his paintings, he was able to breathe life back into his images; the change in his style can be seen in ''Daily News'' (1935). In this painting it appears that the woman, who is seated in a chair, occupies space within the room depicted as opposed to appearing flat as in ''Little Joe with Cow''. The sharp angles in the cow painting are gone in his painting of the woman, but the soft line work and bold use of colors are apparent in both images. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the
1932 Summer Olympics The 1932 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the X Olympiad and also known as Los Angeles 1932) were an international multi-sport event held from July 30 to August 14, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, United States. The Games were held duri ...
. Kuniyoshi's "Artificial Flowers and Other Things" appeared in the
Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
's "Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting," which ran from November 27, 1934, to January 10, 1935, and included the work of one other Japanese-American artist,
Hideo Noda , also known as Hideo Benjamin Noda and Benjamin Hideo Noda, was a Japanese-American modernist painter and muralist, member of the movement in Japan, student of Arnold Blanch, and uncle of Japanese printmaker Tetsuya Noda, as well as alleged co ...
. Even in his images of women where they are full-bodied and seem to have a presence in the painting, such as the woman in ''Daily News'', Kuniyoshi did not entirely throw out painting from memory. Goodrich points out that Kuniyoshi did not work with models for the entire painting process. Rather, the artist drew from the model in the early stages of a painting but eventually stopped using her after about a week or so, and then would continue on from his memory, making adjustments as he saw fit.Goodrich. ''Yasuo Kuniyoshi: Retrospective Exhibition March 27 to May 9, 1948''. 32–34. This desire to paint the ideal perfection of a subject was favored in Japanese art, whereas in Western traditions the painting is typically informed by the real object throughout the entire painting process.


See also

*
Japanese American Committee for Democracy The Japanese American Committee for Democracy (JACD, ja, 日米民主委員会, ''Nichibei Minshu Iinkai'') was an organization during and after World War II. History The Committee was founded in New York in 1940 as the Committee for Democratic T ...
*
Japanese resistance to the Empire of Japan (1937–1945) Political dissidence in the Empire of Japan covers individual Japanese dissidents against the policies of the Empire of Japan. Dissidence in the Meiji and Taishō eras High Treason Incident Shūsui Kōtoku, a Japanese anarchist, was critical ...


Notes


References

* * * *


Bibliography

* * * * * * Becoming American?: Asian Identity Negotiated Through the Art of Yasuo Kuniyoshi By Shi-Pu Wang


External links

* Online Exhibition *
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
(''Densho Encyclopedia''). Retrieved October 29, 2014. * *
Artist Teacher Organizer: Yasuo Kuniyoshi in the Archives of American Art

Yasuo Kuniyoshi papers online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art


Okayama * Conti, Andrew. . In ''Metropolis''; Japan Today, as archived by archive.org on October 12, 2007.
Union List of Artist Names, s.v. "Kuniyoshi, Yasuo"
cited June 2, 2006 * Maine Family prin

Phillips Collection, Washington, DC * Thinking Ahead prin

Phillips Collection, Washington, DC {{DEFAULTSORT:Kuniyoshi, Yasuo American artists of Japanese descent 20th-century American painters 20th-century American photographers 20th-century American printmakers American male painters Art Students League of New York faculty Art Students League of New York alumni People from Okayama Japanese emigrants to the United States 1889 births 1953 deaths Federal Art Project artists Olympic competitors in art competitions Artists from Okayama Prefecture 20th-century American male artists