Yasuo Kuniyoshi
American, 1893-1953
Weather Vane and Objects on a Sofa, 1933
oil on canvas
34 × 60 in.
SBMA, Gift of Wright S. Ludington
1942.30
Kuniyoshi in his studio photographed by [Max] Yavno, for the Works Progress Administration, 1940
RESEARCH PAPER
This painting is a still life, a group of randomly arranged objects on a Victorian sofa; everyday objects, yet imbued with enigmatic meaning, ambiguous yet compelling. It is this element of the painting that is most arresting. The hidden symbolism, the personal vision of the artist is so powerfully understated. The viewer seeks more information looks closer and asks "Who put these things here and why?
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was a Japanese-American. Born in Okayama in 1889, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1906 when he was seventeen. He arrived first in Seattle, then moved to Los Angeles and attended school, where his art talents were first recognized. He moved to New York in 1910 for his formal art training, eventually studying at the Art Student’s League where he remained a student until 1920, and later a teacher, a prestigious position he held for twenty years. He held his first one-man show at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1922, and continued to exhibit widely. Throughout his career until his death in 1953, he received many artistic awards. In 1948 he was honored as the first living artist to be given a retrospective exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Throughout his life he was active in many artist’s groups as a member and as an officer. In 1947 he was elected president of Artist’s Equity; a post he held for four years. He was active not only as an artist and photographer, but as a gifted teacher and concerned citizen. His works, paintings, drawings, lithographs and photographs remain some of the most probing and original in 20th century American art.
Kuniyoshi’s early style is characterized by whimsical, primitive, dreamlike images; doll-like plump children, cows, birds, flowers, subjects drawn from imagination, fantasy and memory. In Kuniyoshi’s middle years, where still life played a large role, he chose to paint directly from the object. Yet this did not limit him to the old ideas of photographic illusionism. His choice of objects, dissimilar, incongruous, ambiguous in their reference went beyond traditional still life. He traveled to Europe in 1925 and again in 1928, and was influenced by various modern movements which were at once experimental, tumultuous and diverse in their theories. Kuniyoshi’s work has similarities to a number of these; the enigmatic qualities of de Chirico’s "magic realism" Chagall’s fantasy and symbolism, Duchamp’s unlikely combinations of objects in Dada, and the Surrealist Magritte’s pristine depictions of the real with the improbable.
Yet Kuniyoshi did not mimic his European counterparts. He remained an essentially American modernist with a very personal and original vision. His search for the basic aesthetic factors of painting led him to explore unorthodox space and point of view, tonal nuances of color, form as the basic component of composition, and the use of symbolism as a tool for the artist’s language of personal expression.
In "Weathervane and Other Objects" Kuniyoshi employs a basically graphic approach to the painting. Form and line are given the most emphasis, curved lines and shapes are reiterated. The color is somber, secondary. The earthtones work to emphasize the objects and the composition. Yet there is in the paint’s thick application, a painterly, textural quality. The brushstrokes sweep the whole surface of the work creating an incised linear pattern that imparts a surface rhythm, a directional movement that is a strong unifying element in the work.
Space is compressed, vague, dislocated in the painting. The oblique angle of the soda, and the view from above follow Japanese conventions in the interpretation of pictorial space; but conventions also embraced by Degas, Cezanne, and later the Cubists. Kuniyoshi’s work expresses the duality of his cultural influences; his Japanese birth and its accompanying cultural aesthetic, and his formal art training and residence in America.
In "Weathervane and Other Objects" Kuniyoshi depicts several objects that function as symbols of the artist’s past, and as symbols for his respect for art and American artistic tradition. The inverted sculpture mold, the photograph of a Goya portrait, the French art magazine, Cahiers d’Art, all acknowledge Kuniyoshi’s appreciation of his artistic heritage and training. The horse-shaped weathervane pays homage to American folk art with its playful, instinctive and unrestrained approach to its subjects. The avocados and grapes make ironic reference to Kuniyoshi’s experiences picking them seventeen hours a day to pay for his further art training. The photograph of the Goya portrait also makes reference to Kuniyoshi’s career as a photographer of art works for galleries and art publications. His photographic career enabled him to further his artistic career both financially and aesthetically as he learned to manipulate the pictorial elements to enhance the visual experience.
In his "Weathervane and Other Objects" Kuniyoshi gives testament to the notion that art has the special capacity to give life to inanimate things. His composition suggests more than is explicitly stated. Here he has transformed a commonplace scene into an arresting visual experience.
Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council by Mary Jo Spencer
March, 1985
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Though he lived and worked in the United States, Kuniyoshi was never allowed to become an American citizen due to the prevalent xenophobia between the World Wars, which culminated with the Japanese internment camps in 1942. His art, by his own description, was an attempt to fuse his experiences in the West with the Eastern sources of his native Japan, which he left as a teenager, barely seventeen years old. One of the most sophisticated avant-garde artists practicing in New York, Kuniyoshi synthesized European modernism with his highly personalized lexicon of motifs. This painting, done after a revelatory trip to Paris, amounts to a symbolic statement of his artistic evolution. On the uptilted sofa ー likely sourced from his many trips to antique shops and flea markets in upstate New York ー we are presented with a reproductive print after a famous painting by the Spanish artist, Goya, a copy of the major art periodical in Paris, Cahier d’art, a concave face mold used to create sculptural replicas, a folk art weathervane in the shape of a galloping horse, several pears and what look to be the globular shapes of (perhaps, Japanese) eggplants. The flatness of the composition and hard-edged, independent modeling of each object recalls the early work of Miró, while there is a Chagall-like sensation of objects floating in an anonymous space, as if in a dream.
- Highlights of American Art, 2020