Background
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born on September 1, 1889, in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan, into the family of Ukichi and Itoko Kuniyoshi. He moved to the United States in 1906 but never was a naturalized citizen.
National Academy of Design
Independent School of Art
Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi, seen here in his New York studio in 1940, exhibited with Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. But his work was quickly forgotten after his death in 1953.
国吉 康雄
painter Photographer printmaker
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born on September 1, 1889, in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan, into the family of Ukichi and Itoko Kuniyoshi. He moved to the United States in 1906 but never was a naturalized citizen.
Yasuo attended high school in Los Angeles, where a teacher told him he had artistic talent, snapping his ambition into focus. After studying art there, in 1910 he relocated to New York, where he attended the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum and School) during 1916 – 1920 and later the Independent School and met his lifelong friend Stuart Davis.
Sixteen-year-old Kuniyoshi left his native Japan in 1906, first arriving in Vancouver before working his way as a fruit picker and bellhop to Los Angeles. His high school art teacher recognized Kuniyoshi’s potential and encouraged him to move to New York City. There Kuniyoshi both learned painting and formed friendships with other artists that completed his education as an American.
Kuniyoshi’s work of this early period shows him both tramping through a jungle of influences as well as unveiling his own, unique persona. "Landscape", painted in 1920, represents “a transitional piece” in which Kuniyoshi not only resolves the pleasures and challenges of Renoir and Cézanne, but does so while also merging Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire motif with the Mount Fuji motif of traditional Japanese art. Similarly, 1927’s "Self-Portrait as a Golf Player" pokes fun at Kuniyoshi’s avid pursuit of the popular American craze for golf, but does so by assuming a warrior’s stance and replacing the shogun’s sword with a driver.
Adding another dimension to Kuniyoshi’s humorous self-portrait were the very real insults to him by 1920s-era America. SAAM Director Elizabeth Broun recounts how Kuniyoshi’s life “was also clouded by constant anxiety related to his immigrant status.” These tears of a multicultural clown (a frequent modern art motif he uses throughout his career) can only be seen if one is able to look closely and decode Kuniyoshi’s clues hidden in plain sight. Thanks to the “nativist racism” endemic to America at the time, Kuniyoshi and his wife suffered greatly. When Schmidt married Kuniyoshi in 1919, her family disowned her, refusing to even speak to her for six years. Additionally, by marrying Kuniyoshi, who, as a Japanese person, could not legally become an American citizen at the time, Schmidt, by law, lost her own American citizenship. And, yet, they bore these sacrifices with a continued faith in art and the American dream. During a trip to Japan in 1931 to see his ailing father, Kuniyoshi witnessed the growing militarism of his native country and returned to America with a new purpose.
In "Self-Portrait as a Photographer" from 1924, Kuniyoshi commented on his divided self. To supplement his income, Kuniyoshi photographed art for publication in magazines, etc. He showed himself emerging from beneath the cloth camera hood, revealing his Asian features. There’s something Frida Kahlo-esque in this exaggeration as if Kuniyoshi portrayed how he felt others negatively perceived his Asian ethnicity just as Kahlo emphasized her unibrow to reveal her inner anguish.
Additional “conceptually intricate” images emerge in Kuniyoshi’s women portraits of the 1930s. These darkly sensual, brooding women can be seen as proxies for Kuniyoshi’s own mental state. In 1935’s Daily News, the inclusion of a newspaper — full of the drumbeats of oncoming world war — subtly suggested Kuniyoshi’s growing anxieties over his ambiguous national status. Despite growing recognition as an artist, including inclusion in "Paintings by 19 Living Americans", Kuniyoshi never shook critics who challenged his “American” credentials. That Kuniyoshi would slip these anxieties into a series of sensual sex objects says just as much about his powerfully creative, synthesizing imagination as it does about his fears of revealing too much too obviously.
Those fears about his alien status rose to new heights after Pearl Harbor. Living in New York City at the time, Kuniyoshi evaded the internment camps Japanese-Americans faced on the West Coast. However, the government seized Kuniyoshi’s camera, forbade him to take pictures, restricted his movements between his New York apartment and home in Woodstock, and even placed him under curfew. As if to prove his “Americanness”, Kuniyoshi began working for the Office of War Information making anti-Japanese propaganda art. In images reminiscent of Goya’s "Disasters of War", Kuniyoshi depicted Japanese military atrocities of torture against the Chinese to argue that such Asian-on-Asian violence proved that WWII was a war of ideology, not race. America’s atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired Kuniyoshi to paint the 1945 hellscape of "Rotting on the Shore", a powerfully pessimistic view of the aftermath of WWII in which Kuniyoshi consistently denounced the disasters of war’s human cost, regardless of the perpetrator.
After the war, Kuniyoshi continued to rise in prominence as an American artist, despite his lack of American citizenship. Just one year after the end of the war, the U.S. State Department purchased Kuniyoshi’s 1925 painting "Circus Girl Resting" to include in their Advancing American Art exhibition to tour overseas. Charges of obscenity and “un-American” politics against the show and Kuniyoshi, however, eventually led to the cancellation of the tour. When artists from various disciplines formed the Artists Equity Association in 1947, they elected Kuniyoshi as their first president. Sadly, Kuniyoshi, the man whom the American establishment never fully accepted, became the face for the establishment in the eyes of the post-war generation of “The Irascibles” and Abstract Expressionists.
In 1953, the final year of his life, as cancer slowly took his life while family rushed to complete the citizenship application finally made possible in 1952 by the McCarran–Walter Act, Kuniyoshi drew "Old Tree." Yasuo died on May 14, 1953 in New York, United States.
Fisherman
Landscape, Paris - (On the Seine)
Pipe and Cigars
The Storm
Nude at Door
Little Joe with Cow
Circus Girl No. 1 - (On the Wire)
Summer - (Girl Leaning Against a Tree)
Little Joe - (Farm Boy)
Landscape with Cow
New England Landscape I
Cafe No. 2
Landscape
Night Police, Paris
Still Life at Window
Mr. Ace
Forbidden Fruit
Milking the Cow
Daisies in a White Pitcher
Burlesque Queen
Girl Dressing
I Was Just Married
Waitresses from the Sparhawk
The Bather
I'm Tired
Two Acrobats
Bullfight
Self-Portrait as a Golf Player
The Calf Doesn't Want To Go
Three Peaches
Vase of Flowers, No. 2
Dressing
Across the Street
Nude at Door
Girl with Cigarette
Flowers in Friend's Window
Remains of Lunch
Pretzels
Interior with Dress Form
Girl in Feathered Hat - (The Feathered Hat)
Carnival
Four Nudes - (Café on the Boulevard Clichy)
Strong Woman and Child
Girl at Table - (At the Café)
Bather with Cigarette
Girl on Sofa
Checked Cloth - (Fruit in Basket)
Tired Clown
Still Life at Window
Peaches and Grapes on a Round Table
Free Lodging
Squash
Bather on a Rock - (Island of Happiness)
Dancing
Three Dancers
Life Saver
Carnations
The Shower
Western Landscape
The Storm
Circus Girl
Somebody Tore my Poster
Fakirs
Wire Walker
Semi-Nude, Standing
Landscape
Still Life - (Peaches and Grapes)
After the Bath
Untitled - Woman in Front of Mirror
Girl Reading In A Window
The Acrobat
Striped Vase - (Flowers)
Revelation
Circus Girl Resting
Self Portrait
From the Boardwalk
Tightrope Performer
Pears and Grapes - (Three Pears and Grapes)
Fish Kite
Peach and Grapes
Railroad
Dream
Japanese Toy Tiger and Odd Objects
Head of a Young Girl
Two Figures
Girl in Hammock
Girl Thinking
Girl Wearing Bandana
Aerialist
Child
The Bull
Artificial Flower
Milking the Cow
Kuniyoshi continually denounced the Japanese militarism he personally separated from the larger Japanese tradition.
In 1935 Yasuo became one of the founding members of the American Artists Congress. He also served as the first president of the Artists Equity from 1947 to 1951
Kuniyoshi was very patriotic and identified himself as an American.
Quotes from others about the person
Kuniyoshi’s art is subtle and sophisticated, idiosyncratic and unique. During the course of his career, it ranged from deadpan humor through erotic sensuality to deep tragedy. It is rich and profound and should be better known.
Yasuo married a fellow student, Katherine Schmidt, in 1919. The couple divorced in 1932.