Self-Portrait as a Golf Player
1927
oil on canvas
Self-Portrait as a Golf Player is the largest and most assertive of Kuniyoshi’s self-portraits. The artist
enjoyed playing golf in Ogunquit, Maine, and Woodstock, New York, where he built a summerhouse in
1929. Owing to his nationality, he could not join a country club with a golf course but was allowed to
play as a guest of one of his friends. Here his confident pose belies this second-class status. He stands
with legs akimbo and golf club at his side, the traditional stance of a samurai with a sword. He made no
attempt to disguise his Asian facial features, and contemporary critics likened the color of his vest to
Japanese lacquer.
In 1929 this work was featured in the first exhibition of contemporary American art, Paintings by 19
Living Americans, at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some critics complained that
Kuniyoshi was not “American” enough to be included, but his defenders pointed out that he had lived
most of his life in the United States and his artistic career was based entirely in America.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
Maine Family
about 1922–23
oil on canvas
Kuniyoshi spent many summers in the early 1920s at an artists’ colony in Ogunquit, Maine, founded by
his friend and patron Hamilton Easter Field. Kuniyoshi and Field shared an interest in Japanese prints and
European and American modernist painting. Field believed contemporary artists should draw on the
traditions of non-European cultures, and he appreciated the elements of Japanese art that Kuniyoshi
incorporated in his work, such as the strongly tilted space of Maine Family.
The simple geometric houses fit snugly in the landscape, leading one’s eye into the distance, but the
figures seem less comfortable in the space. The mother stares off to the side, lost in thought. The little girl
has stopped playing with her hoop to look directly at the viewer, while the baby crawls awkwardly on the
tilted ground, his legs too small for his body. Where is the father of this family? Could the small bare tree
represent the absent father?
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Acquired 1940
Self-Portrait
1918
oil on canvas
Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan
Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s earliest self-portrait, dated 1918, shows him as a serious art student, with hat, glasses,
moustache, and a bow tie. Already, the simplified forms and flattened, shallow space anticipate his
modernist expression.
Self-Portrait as a Photographer, painted six years later, boldly exaggerates his Asian facial features and
prominent cheekbones, with the black cloth of the camera setup draped over his head like a monk’s hood.
At the time this painting was completed, in 1924, Kuniyoshi worked as a photographer to help support
himself. Here his raised arm directs our gaze to the landscape toward which the camera is pointed. Is the
landscape a view out the window, or is it a painting of a landscape? Is the landscape black and white
because the photograph will be monochrome? Or do the gray landscape and barren trees suggest that he
sees a bleak future? The artist sets up a conceptually intricate subject that indicates the many levels of
interpretation intended in his paintings.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Boy Stealing Fruit
1923
oil on canvas
A little boy, who has already grabbed a banana, reaches a greedy hand into a fruit bowl while looking
over his shoulder to see if anyone is watching. The stylized figure and white glass bowl recall early
American folk art, which experienced a surge of interest in the 1920s among the artists of the Ogunquit
art colony. The skewed perspective of the table also evokes naive, untrained folk artists, and the
simplified geometric shapes out the window are inspired by Maine’s colonial architecture. After World
War I, artists and collectors became fascinated by early Americana. Kuniyoshi may have adopted this
style to emphasize his own identity as an American at a time of isolationism, when new immigrants were
scorned.
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Gift of Ferdinand Howald
Child Frightened by Water
1924
oil on canvas
During the mid-1920s, Kuniyoshi painted several subjects on the theme of fear. The wide-eyed expression
of the child in this painting can be understood as fright, as he is lifted to safety high above the water that
threatens to engulf him.
Could Kuniyoshi also have felt anxious as the US government enacted the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924,
which made it illegal for people from Asia to immigrate to the United States? Immigration for Asians was
already limited, and now the new ban marooned Kuniyoshi and his small group of Japanese artist friends
in New York, with no more colleagues coming from Asia to join them.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Gift of Joseph H.
Hirshhorn, 1966
Little Joe with Cow
1923
oil on canvas
Cows appear frequently in Kuniyoshi’s paintings, prints, and drawings of the 1920s. He identified closely
with this animal, since he was born in a “cow year” according to the Japanese lunar calendar. His early
renderings of the animal were naturalistic, but he quickly developed the distinctive, stylized version that
appears in this painting: massive body, pointed hindquarters and head, and outsize eyes. Especially
strange is the presence of both male horns and prominent female udders, hanging almost to the ground.
This is the largest cow in any of his paintings, taking up almost half the canvas.
The lush plants to the right of the cow and above its head dwarf the few trees in the composition. Little
Joe himself is like a plant emerging from a mound of dirt and foliage. The child’s legs substitute for the
cow’s foreleg, and the cow’s body subsumes the outline of the boy. The identity of the two is complete in
this fantasy melding of Japanese symbolism, personal identity, and fecund nature.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Island of Happiness
1924
oil on canvas
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Sleeping Beauty
1924
pen and ink, brush and ink, and graphite pencil on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Mrs. Edith Gregor Halpert
Kuniyoshi introduced the female nude as a major theme in 1924, creating figures from his imagination
rather than from models. The sensuous reclining nudes of Island of Happiness and Sleeping Beauty are
encircled by a womb-like form with marine flora and fauna. The bathers float in space with eyes closed,
as if in a dream. The octopus recalls the erotic encounters of women and octopi in many nineteenthcentury Japanese prints, especially those by the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861). Two
smiling cupids hovering above the sleeping figure are Western symbols of love; perhaps the blissful scene
refers to the artist’s love for his wife. The protective enclosure suggests that his marriage was an island of
happiness and security in an otherwise difficult environment, at a time when anti-immigrant feelings in
the country were strong.
Bad Dream
1924
ink on paper
The three nudes in Bad Dream appear to be the same figure in various stages of dismemberment and
death. The voluptuous figure in a small pool of water in the center of the composition is attacked by devillike creatures and finally carried away, eyes closed, by a frightening hybrid animal; a cow with a
grotesque horse head and legs replacing his hindquarters watches nearby. This nightmare image of
vulnerability may represent Kuniyoshi’s anxiety, as his wife was disowned by her parents and lost her
American citizenship after she married him.
Collection Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine; Gift of Henry Strater
Remains of Lunch
1922
pen and ink, brush and ink on paper
Kuniyoshi’s early drawings were often humorous, and his keen wit and interest in visual and verbal puns
are evident in Remains of Lunch. This drawing unpretentiously displays the remnants of a light meal, with
a demitasse spoon, cigarette butt, dollops of pear sauce, and a fluted, paper pastry cup. The artist’s widow
noted that Kuniyoshi loved pears and pear sauce. Here he plays with the homonyms “pear” and “pair,”
matching birds, leaves, and fruits along the border of the plate. The two pears at the top lean
affectionately against each other. The ink field enclosing the composition resembles a stomach in which
food is being digested.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment, 2003.18
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Weathervane and Objects on a Sofa
1933
oil on canvas
Kuniyoshi acknowledged the diverse influences in his art in this eccentric collection of objects
haphazardly displayed on a couch. A horse weather vane is reminiscent of the American folk art that
Kuniyoshi loved and collected. Below this is a copy of Cahiers d’Art, the Parisian magazine that brought
news of the latest French art to America. The white object is a mold for a sculpture by his friend Paul
Fiene, another member of the Woodstock art colony. A bunch of grapes, two eggplants, and a peach
create a still life within a still life. Partially hidden, a reproduction of a portrait by Francisco de Goya
represents the European old-master painting tradition that Kuniyoshi admired. The view from above and
the diagonal composition recall a fundamental convention of Japanese prints.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Gift of Wright S. Ludington
Daily News
1935
oil on canvas
The seated woman in Daily News is thoughtful and a bit melancholy, dispirited by the newspaper she has
just been reading. By 1935 the Great Depression was in full force in the United States, and nationalism
was on the rise in Germany and Japan. Kuniyoshi’s one return visit to his native country was in 1931,
when he was disturbed to witness the militaristic buildup that led to the Japanese occupation of
Manchuria that year. The figure has the erotic attributes of his earlier circus girls—skimpy dress, exposed
breast—but the outside world, represented by the newspaper, has now complicated life in the artist’s
studio.
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1959.48
Circus Girl Resting
1925
oil on canvas
Kuniyoshi painted Circus Girl Resting just after his first visit to Europe in 1925. Strongly influenced by
the more erotic subjects he encountered in Paris, he painted an unashamedly provocative image of a
voluptuous woman, one strap of her skimpy slip falling to reveal her breast, and black stockings exposing
an expanse of thigh. Her direct gaze, suggestive smile, and hand pulling back a curtain are signs of a
seductress rather than a circus performer. Even the fruit bowl’s arrangement of bananas and grapes
underscores the theme.
In 1946 the US Department of State purchased this painting to be included in its Advancing American Art
exhibition, an important cultural diplomacy project that featured such notable contemporary artists as
Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles
Sheeler. But for many Americans modern art still seemed subversive, and the exhibition was closed under
sharp criticism. Circus Girl Resting was singled out by no less than President Harry Truman, not for its
eroticism but for its unrealistic figure proportions. A subtext of this criticism was Kuniyoshi’s
background as an “alien” from Japan, the enemy just defeated.
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, Alabama; Advancing American Art
Collection
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Strong Woman with Child
1925
oil on canvas
The tricolored flags and mansard roofs of the houses in the background signal Kuniyoshi’s recent trip to
Paris, where circus figures entered his repertoire of subjects. In contrast to the eroticism of some of his
circus subjects, Strong Woman with Child shows a female weight lifter holding the hand of a child,
possibly her son. A barbell lies between them, but her protective gesture dominates their relationship. The
scalloped valance at top suggests a stage where the two perform as a single act.
Representations of performers were popular in Japanese prints and served as inspiration for European
depictions, which then stimulated Kuniyoshi and other American artists, such as Walt Kuhn and
Alexander Calder, to explore this subject. By 1925, the year he painted this work, Kuniyoshi had not seen
his own mother for nineteen years. Without children of his own, Kuniyoshi may have painted this pair to
suggest his longing for this familial relationship.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.50
End of Juanita
1942
oil on canvas
“Juanita” refers to the ceramic pitcher that Kuniyoshi and his second wife purchased on their honeymoon
in Mexico in 1935, which broke while they were separated in the early 1940s. The sensuous shape of the
pitcher echoes the nude to the right. The cloth enfolding the vase suggests regret for the damage to Juanita
as well as for the broken state of his marriage.
Brooklyn Museum, New York; Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal
I Wear a Mask Today
1946–47
wax on canvas
When Kuniyoshi returned to circus imagery after World War II, he transformed it into a bitter expression
of personal anxiety. He frequently remarked “Life is a circus,” at once an ironic comment on the
contradictions and hypocrisy he saw around him and an off-hand observation that hid his true feelings.
In I Wear a Mask Today the artist reveals himself lifting a clown mask that hides his true expression.
Throughout the war and its immediate aftermath, he was wary of showing any sympathy for the Japanese
people or the Japanese internees in the United States for fear that his patriotism might be questioned.
Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan
Between Two Worlds
1939
oil on canvas
Three young women in beach attire stroll casually through a desolate landscape. The disjuncture between
the figures and the landscape embodies the ambivalence suggested by the title and the chaotic state of a
world on the brink of war. Events in Europe and Asia were disturbing to Kuniyoshi, especially the specter
of rising Japanese militarism that he had sought to escape as a young immigrant.
Collection of Gallery Nii, Osaka, Japan
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Somebody Tore My Poster
1943
oil on canvas
A fashionably dressed woman with slender gloved hands stands before a torn propaganda poster about
French workers. Kuniyoshi’s friend Ben Shahn created the poster for the Office of War Information in
1942 to read: “We French workers warn you . . . defeat means slavery, starvation, death.” Where it is torn,
an image of a circus performer is painted on the wall almost like a thought balloon above the woman’s
head. Here again the disparate aspects of Kuniyoshi’s world collide—a woman/muse, the circus, the war,
France. Collection of Gallery Nii, Osaka, Japan
Rotting on the Shore
1945
oil on canvas
Dead tree limbs and a praying mantis invade the interior of this scene, while outside a half-eaten fish
trophy with a bronze plaque is upended in a silver bowl in a desolate landscape. Nature, civilization, and
personal accomplishment are decaying inside the artist’s studio and in the world beyond.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally brought an end to the war also
brought personal devastation to this artist. He had taken refuge in the United States some forty years
earlier to avoid Japanese militarism, and now the Japanese assault on America at Pearl Harbor had
provoked the most destructive attack the world had ever seen. Although Kuniyoshi rarely referenced
specific events in his work, his intense emotions find expression in this postwar imagery.
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Bequest of R. H. Norton
Fish Kite
1950
oil on canvas
In Fish Kite, Kuniyoshi turned to a purely Japanese subject, the festive kites flown on Boys’ Day, an
annual celebration in his native country. The kites are wind socks with one side open to catch the wind
and one side closed to contain it. As the wind blows into the mouth of the fish, the kite wriggles around,
giving the impression of a swimming fish, usually a freshwater carp. The upstream struggle of the fish
represents the passage of a boy to manhood. According to legend, when the carp reaches the river source,
it becomes a dragon.
This fish kite is held by a male performer; the date July 4 appears nearby. An iconic image of Japanese
culture juxtaposed with an iconic date in American history suggests that Kuniyoshi is the performer, again
trying to reconcile two competing traditions.
Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan
Mr. Ace
1952
oil on canvas
After the war Kuniyoshi returned to the theme of circus performers but now depicted them as grotesque
clowns in garish colors. Mr. Ace lifts his mask to reveal an aging man who smiles enigmatically. The
exaggerated but fixed expression of the mask, like a Japanese Noh mask, contrasts with the worn,
skeptical face of the performer. According to his protégé Bruce Dorfman, Kuniyoshi saw the 1946 movie
Mr. Ace, starring George Raft and Sylvia Sidney, several times. Although the subject of the movie had
little to do with Kuniyoshi, he saw the relationship between the husband and wife in the film paralleling
aspects of his own marital relationship. By 1952 the artist was already ill with the stomach cancer that
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would kill him the following year. Here Mr. Ace raises his right hand in a gesture of greeting or farewell,
most likely the latter as the artist anticipates his imminent death.
Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan
Fakirs
1951
oil on canvas
Fakirs presents one of the most menacing images of Kuniyoshi’s career. The clown with the long, pointy
nose, green mask, and folded hat seems threatening as he noisily blows his own horn. A small white-faced
figure with a party hat dangles from his arm, while another clown figure peaks in at the left. Who are
these strange misshapen figures?
The word fakirs recalls a tradition from New York’s Art Students League, where Kuniyoshi studied as a
young man and later taught for two decades, in which students organized a costume ball to mock the
conservative and conventional art they disdained. They called themselves the Society of American Fakirs
and painted “fakes” of academic paintings, which they sold at an auction accompanied by a parade, a
sideshow, and a ball.
A large gold hand held up palm forward in the gesture of a vow is a focal point of the composition. Might
this suggest the cynical hypocrisy of the 1950s congressional investigations that Kuniyoshi considered a
travesty of justice and a sideshow of the American political system? Or were other clowns and sideshows
haunting him then?
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.93
Old Tree
about 1953
ink on paper
Kuniyoshi concluded his career with a series of black-and-white drawings, of which Old Tree is the
largest and most heavily worked. The artist used many layers of black ink and tore into the surface with a
razor blade, roughening the surface to resemble the tree’s bark. The tree is weathered, powerful, and
scarred by experience, perhaps a final symbolic self-portrait. A lone blackbird appears like an omen of
death.
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Special Purchase Fund, 1953
Festivities Ended
1947
oil on canvas
In Festivities Ended, an upside-down merry-go-round horse is suspended precariously by the pole that
once held it upright. Its right front leg and left rear leg are bound with a string of carnival banners. A
billboard urges hygiene, while an oversize eye on the billboard is juxtaposed with the horse’s eye. A
young girl lies on the ground under a threatening sky; her eyes are open, but she is oblivious to the scene
around her. A male figure lies partially hidden behind the horse’s hindquarters. When asked about this
painting in 1948, Kuniyoshi replied philosophically, “The world is chaotic today, but we must go on.”
Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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War Drawings
The years of World War II were traumatic for Kuniyoshi. Immediately after the Japanese bombing of
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US government reclassified Kuniyoshi as an “enemy alien,”
impounded his bank account, confiscated his camera and binoculars, and restricted his travel outside New
York City. Nonetheless, he remained a fervent believer in the democratic system and a fierce opponent of
Japanese militarism. He worked actively to support the Allies, recording radio broadcasts to the people of
Japan for Voice of America and making propaganda drawings for the Office of War Information.
Many of his war drawings are brutal indictments of Japanese atrocities. Hanged shows corpses in trees
that recall Goya’s Disasters of War series. Clean Up This Mess depicts a huge hand holding a garbage
bag stuffed with the Japanese flag, bloody samurai swords, and an octopus, ready to be dropped into the
void. The largest and most powerful is Torture, intended for a poster, showing the muscled torso of a man
wrestling with shackles that painfully bind his hands, all in black and white except for the red welts on his
skin.
Postwar Anxiety
For most Americans the end of World War II represented a great victory and triumphant confirmation of
the ideals for which they had fought. Kuniyoshi’s emotions were more complicated. As an American, he
shared in the joy of success, but he also felt anxiety, even despair, over the war and its aftermath. He felt
empathy for his fellow Japanese immigrants who were placed in internment camps during the war but was
hesitant to express his concerns overtly for fear of seeming unpatriotic. He was ashamed of the brutality
of the Japanese army but also felt sympathy for the victims of the atomic bombs. On the political front, he
was appalled by the postwar witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee. On the artistic
front, he felt out of step with abstract expressionism, which was emerging as the dominant style of
American art, at home and abroad.
Kuniyoshi expressed these complex emotions in his art. In unpublished autobiographical notes from 1944
he wrote: “If a man feels deeply about the war, or any sorrow or gladness, his feeling should be
symbolized in his expression, no matter what medium he chooses.” The artist’s postwar paintings are
dramatically different from his earlier work, with brighter, even acidic colors and compositions that
suggest chaos and confusion. In them is an underlying sense of disillusionment and bitterness. The forms
are symbolic, but the meaning of the symbols is often unclear.
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