Yasuo Kuniyoshi
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YASUO KUNIYOSHI was born in Okayama, Japan, about 1890. Coming to the United States in 1906, without friends or money, he went through years of hardship, studying art when he could, and finding his most enlightened teacher in Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League. His early paintings and drawings, from 1920 on, were the work of a nave, instinctive artist of extraordinary gifts. A unique blend of the Oriental mind and Western technique, they were basically Japanese in their fantasy, their humor, and their interest in all forms of life, down to the most minute-birds and snakes, flowers and weeds, human beings and animals (especially the cow, since he was born in the Year of the Cow). And they were Oriental in their exquisite draftsmanship and their freedom from Occidental ideas of naturalism or perspective. In these early works Kuniyoshi made a highly original contribution to modern art.
Two long visits to France, in 1925 and 1928, produced a more sophisticated viewpoint, closer to contemporary Parisian modernism, and a great gain in skill. Kuniyoshi was a born painter: to him painting was a deeply sensuous process, yielding pure physical pleasure. He loved the pigment itself and its manipulation; he loved textures, ranging from thick impastos to delicate translucent glazes; he loved earthy, resonant color. His brushwork with its sensitive calligraphy was a language in itself. There were no flat or dull passages in his pictures; the whole surface was alive. In his work a rich sensual vitality expressed itself with instinctive artistry.
In middle years his range of subjects was not wide-chiefly women and still-life. His girls in dishabille with their voluptuous impassive faces and their languid pensiveness were embodiments of sexual magnetism. His still-lifes, witty assemblages of seemingly incongruous objects--a vase, a handful of cigars, a pair of binoculars, a toy tiger--not only embodied his zest for forms and colors, but suggested associations beyond the things themselves. This symbolic element in his art increased with the years. Simple naturalism gave way to a growing imaginative character. From 1940 on, his work showed broader human sympathies, a widening social sense, and a new awareness of the state of the world. It was rich in imagery bordering on surrealism, but of a highly individual kind. Its symbolism was never obvious, and often left a final impression of mystery and ambiguity, like much imaginative art. Women still played a central role; they and clowns, masqueraders and circus performers recalled the pleasure principle which had ruled his earlier work--but now they were pictured amid ruins, or in landscapes of poignant desolation. In their mingling of sensualism and melancholy, these paintings seemed to say that the carnival was over. In the work of his last five years, from 1948 until his death in 1953, this ominous dreamlike quality reached an almost hectic intensity. His color flowered into an extraordinary brilliance, with startling new hues--vermilion, saffron, lilac--pushed to extremes of high pitch and planned dissonance. These last paintings, with their gaiety and bitterness, their audacity and sumptuousness, were his most triumphant imaginative achievements. His art had come full circle-from fantasy through naturalism back to fantasy.
Kuniyoshi : Throughout these many years of painting I have practised starting my work from reality stating the facts before me. Then I paint without the object for a certain length of time, combining reality and imagination. . . . When I have condensed and simplified sufficiently I know then that I have something more than reality.
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