Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Landscape
1924

Painting of a rural landscape with a white church, houses, and dark hills under a dramatic, cloudy sky.

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.

Visual Description

Landscape is a modest-sized, horizontal oil painting on canvas. It is about 1.5feet tall and 2.5 feet wide. The scene depicts a rugged landscape viewed from a low vantage point. It is painted in earth and copper tones with intermittent swaths of white and black.

A massive rock formation dominates the center of the composition. It is surrounded by a sparse cluster of weeds, including one with tall, sinuous leaves tinged with a murky yellow. On the right half of the canvas, just beyond the rock, are two buildings rendered as simplified, geometric shapes—rectangles and triangles of flat color. Diagonally positioned, they face one another from the top and bottom of a hill. A small barren tree, an evergreen, and a farm plot appear in the distance, partly hidden behind the building on the far right.

Above the craggy terrain is a dusty sky with long, ghoulish clouds that appear at once diaphanous and weighty. At the top of the canvas, a large strip of auburn, applied with varying opacity, extends horizontally across the painting from the left to the right edges. Below it, wispy clouds of grey, yellow, and black hover close to the land.

This dreamy, enigmatic scene captures Kuniyoshi’s impression of the remote fishing village and popular artist colony of Ogunquit, Maine, where he spent his summers in the 1920s. Similar to other works from this period, he exaggerates the scale of elements such as the oversize leaves in front of the rock in the foreground. A sense of somber eeriness pervades this strangely distorted and starkly rendered world.

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

API
artworks/647