Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Japanese American artist
NY 1920s honors Asian American Pacific Islander Month
One hundred years ago today … Japanese American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s “Eggplant” was part of an exhibit of modern American art at the Bourgeois Gallery.
The Times reviewer called it “Shrill and harsh” (“The World of Art: Spring Crop of Modernism,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 14 May, 1922, p. 23).
Nonetheless, 1922 was an important year of his burgeoning career. A week later, Kuniyoshi would be showing his work at the sixth annual exhibition of the Brooklyn Society of Artists, held at the Brooklyn Museum. He was the subject of a 1922 book by William Murrell, part of a “Younger Artists Series” published by William M. Fisher, which you can read in its entirety here.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, “Girl at the Piano” (1921). In William Murrell, Yasuo Kuniyoshi. (Woodstock: William M. Fisher, 1922), 10.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, “The Flapper” (1921). In William Murrell, Yasuo Kuniyoshi. (Woodstock: William M. Fisher, 1922), 5.
Kuniyoshi had come to the US in 1906, lived in Seattle and NYC, studied at New York’s Independent School and the Art Students League, and wound up spending most of his life in the US. In 1919 he married artist Katherine Schmidt, who lost her citizenship due to the marriage (Chang, et al.)
Kuniyoshi, “Adam and Eve” (1922). Smithsonian Magazine.
References/Further Reading:
Chang, Gordon H.; Johnson, Mark Dean; Karlstrom, Paul J.; Spain, Sharon (2008). Asian American art, a history 1850-1970. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
– Jonathan Goldman, May 14, 2022
TAGS: Japanese, AAPI, Asian, art, painting, Brooklyn, ethnicity, citizenship, immigration, reviews, modernism