国吉康雄

Kuniyoshi Yasuo was born on September 1, 1889 (Meiji 22) in present-day Izushichō, Kita-ku, Okayama city as the first son of father Ukichi 宇吉 and mother Ito 以登. After graduating from the ordinary school and higher elementary school in that city, at the age of 15 he entered the textile department at Okayama Technical High School. He quit school in 1906 and that summer traveled solo to North America. While Kuniyoshi went on to become a leading painter in America during the first half of the twentieth century, he first set sail with a dream of living in America and learning English. His journey took him via Vancouver, Canada and Seattle, Washington. He then moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 1907, where he made a living doing various jobs while studying English at a public school. Because he couldn’t yet speak the language, he turned to drawing pictures to communicate. One of his teachers noticed these pictures, saw that he had painting talent, and encouraged him become a painter. Kuniyoshi began attending an art school in Los Angeles thanks to that teacher’s advice. He worked during the day and studied painting at night for the next three years. With the desire to become a proper painter, Kuniyoshi moved to New York in the autumn of 1910. He lodged with Kawabe Masao (1874–1918), an interior design artist from Okayama who knew his father, and studied painting as he helped in Kawabe’s studio. In 1914 he began two years of study at the Independent School of Arts, followed in 1916 by what would become four years at the school he felt was the most important art school of the time, the Art Students League. There his talents grew under the tutelage of the gifted teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952), and he met other students who would become his friends, including Lloyd Goodrich (1897–1987), who later became director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Katharine Schmidt (1899–1978), who he subsequently married. While studying at the League he participated in the Penguin Club, a group of young avant-garde artists in New York, and met Jules Pascin (1885–1930), who had come to America from Paris to escape World War I and would become a good friend. As seen in a representative example, “Picnic” (1919, Fukutake Collection, Okayama), the works from this period are brightly colored with visible brush strokes, revealing the influence of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism then being introduced from Europe. Kuniyoshi married Katharine Schmidt in 1919 and he set up an environment where he could concentrate on his painting, thanks to support from the collector, critic, and artist Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922), who provided him with an apartment in Brooklyn where he lived in the winter and a summer studio in Ogunquit, Maine. He held his first solo show at the Daniel Gallery in New York, a success that garnered favorable reviews. Many of Kuniyoshi’s early period works from the 1920s, such as “Milking” (1921, The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama), “Child” (ca. 1923, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art), and “Two Babies” (1923, Fukutake Collection), reveal influence from American folk art, unusually shaped motifs such as cows and children, and the use of a dreamy bird’s eye view vantage point. The shift from his early period naïf and yet uniquely unreal style to the realism of the 1930s was set off by two trips to Europe, in 1925 and 1928. Kuniyoshi’s friend Pascin had returned to Paris after World War I and urged him to go to Europe. During his time there Pascin’s suggestions led Kuniyoshi to take up the circus as subject. Instead of his previous method of painting almost solely from his imagination and memories of the past, he was able to realize a painting method whereby he stood before his subjects and directly depicted them as real things. This meant that, like Pascin’s, many of his images of women became languid, seemingly bored creatures hinting at the carnal, and in the 1930s, they approached his idealized image of “universal woman.” After returning from his second trip to Europe, in 1929 he was selected for the “Paintings by 19 Living Americans” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He continued to work, establishing a firm position in American painting circles. The Great Depression began that year, and as America’s social conditions worsened, an uneasy air pervaded all of American society. His 1930s paintings which reflect that period’s feeling include the languid women in “Girl Thinking” (1935, Fukutake Collection) and “Girl Wearing Bandana” (1936, Fukutake Collection), still-lifes such as “Weather Vane and Objects on a Sofa” (1933, Santa Barbara Museum of Art), and landscapes with threatening dark clouds in the background such as “Stormy Weather” (1936, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art). During that period he returned to Japan in 1931, his first trip there in twenty-five years, to visit his sick father, and held solo shows in both Tokyo and Osaka. On the ship back to America in February 1932 he received the news that his father had died. That same year he and Katharine divorced, and in 1935 he married his second wife Sara Mazo (1910–2006). In 1933 he began to teach at his alma mater Art Students League, and starting in 1936, he also taught at New School for Social Research. He continued to foster younger artists until his death. As Japanese militarism advanced, relations between America and Japan worsened. With America’s declaration of war on Japan in December 1941, Kuniyoshi became an “enemy alien.” Even though he had been unable to become an American citizen and had established himself in the American art world as a Japanese, he criticized Japan’s militarism through the creation of anti-war posters and other actions, all in his firm belief in the American principles of freedom and democracy. He was distressed as the antagonism between Japan and American worsened and the war continued, with his emotional suffering and sense of isolation casting a dark shadow over his art. He created works with a strong sense of message, whether “Somebody Tore My Poster” (1943, private collection) or “Dawn is Coming” (1944, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art). These can be seen as an extension of his 1930s images of somehow fearful women, or works filled with an uneasy, gloomy war feeling, such as the unbalanced arrangement of deeply meaningful objects in “Upside Down Table and Mask” (1940, Fukutake Collection), “Headless Horse Who Wants to Jump” (1945, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki), and “The Festivities Ended” (1947, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art). In the postwar era, he was the first living artist to be given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was awarded the highest accolades by American painting circles. It was around then that Kuniyoshi’s style changed for the last time. He shifted from his previous use of a characteristic “Kuniyoshi brown” coloration to a bright palette with thinly applied reds and blues, all while creating a fresco-like painting surface. As seen in “Mr. Ace” (1952, Fukutake Collection), masks, costumes, and figures with uncanny expressions frequently appeared, and he once again took up circus motifs. These final period works with their vivid colors, buffoonery, and circus motifs were all somehow deeply etched with melancholy. Kuniyoshi continued to question his own identity, was he Japanese or American, but he was never able to realize his long-hoped-for retrospective in his homeland Japan. And just before he completed the process needed to receive his long sought American citizenship, he died from stomach cancer on May 14, 1953. A memorial exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York almost immediately after his death, and the following year, a memorial exhibition was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. That exhibition then traveled to Osaka and Nagoya venues. (Hashimura Naoki / Translated by Martha J. McClintock) (Published online: 2024-03-06)