Yasuo Kuniyoshi
1889–1953

Yasuo Kuniyoshi emigrated from Japan to the United States in 1906, moving to California and then in 1910 to New York. There he studied at the Art Students League and became an active participant in the Whitney Studio Club and a prominent figure in American art during the first half of the century. Kuniyoshi and others in his circle, in particular his friend and teacher Hamilton Easter Field, were fascinated by American folk art and adopted a faux-naïf style for some of their work of the 1920s. Kuniyoshi combined this sensibility with sophisticated undercurrents culled from traditional Japanese painting and symbolism and stylistic elements from European modernism. Child is representative of his painting from this period, with the flattening of the space and the tilting of the table revealing an acute awareness of Cubism as well as Japanese printmaking. The influence of Colonial American arts, including the decorative arts, is also evident in the clothes and furniture and in the wide-eyed, stiff pose of the child.

Kuniyoshi often depicted women, children, and female circus performers, drawn from both his memory and imagination, in poses with mysterious objects that create enigmatic narratives. In 1948 Kuniyoshi was the subject of the Whitney Museum’s first retrospective of a living artist, despite his having been legally barred, because of his national origins, from receiving US citizenship.

Introduction

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (国吉康雄, Kuniyoshi Yasuo, September 1, 1889 – May 14, 1953) was a Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.

Wikidata identifier

Q3571991

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Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Accessed November 19, 2024.

Introduction

Comment on works: genre

Country of birth

Japan

Roles

Artist, genre artist, painter, photographer

ULAN identifier

500023210

Names

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Kuniyoshi, 国吉康雄, 國吉康雄

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed November 19, 2024.