Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Landscape
1924
On view
Floor 7
Date
1924
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Oil on linen
Dimensions
Overall: 20 1/4 × 30 1/8in. (51.4 × 76.5 cm)
Accession number
31.271
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase
Rights and reproductions
© Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
During the 1920s, Yasuo Kuniyoshi painted landscape compositions based on the rugged coastal setting of Ogunquit, Maine, where he spent his summers. Like contemporaneous works of this period, Landscape portrays its subject from a low viewpoint; its dream-like composition is marked by odd relationships of scale, such as the oversize prominence of the leaves in the foreground. Like Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and other American artists of this era, Kuniyoshi used a semi-abstracted modernist language to mine the personal qualities of the American landscape, transforming it into a vehicle for conveying mood and emotion.