Word: kuniyoshi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...need not have worried; the critics were "kind"; Kuniyoshi's artist friends, who call him "Yas" (for Yasuo), were jubilant. What gloom there was, and there was plenty, emanated from the pictures themselves...
Club in Hand. "My paintings are sad," Kuniyoshi explains simply, "because I am a sad man. I feel very lonely." Kuniyoshi, twice-married, is president of the 850-member Artists' Equity, and a thoroughly sociable member of the Greenwich Village-Woodstock, N.Y. artists' set. His loneliness may go back to the day in 1906 when he arrived in the U.S. from Japan, a friendless boy of 13, to seek his fortune...
...Kuniyoshi made his reputation in the 1920s with relatively cheerful designs featuring plump ladies in swimming, cows, babies and trapeze artists fitted together in orientally flat, bird's-eye perspectives. They caught collectors' fancies, earned him money and leisure enough to take up golf. In one self-portrait he carries a golf club as proudly as a samurai sword...
...Kuniyoshi looks rather like a prematurely aged Japanese schoolboy. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and a porkpie hat, smokes a pipe, and says he has "no time" for golf any more. He is too busy working, nine hours a day, on the sorts of pictures that fill most of his Whitney show: ragged, melancholy still lifes, Western landscapes and dusky figure paintings. Each painting begins with a detailed charcoal drawing from the model, which he modifies from month to month as he sees fit. "I play with my paintings," he says, "and I sometimes have a dozen of them going...
Ruin on the Table. His still lifes at the Whitney might each have been assembled from a ruin and tied together with string -pipes, masks, torn letters, weather vanes and carnival prizes teetering on Victorian tables. Kuniyoshi's figure paintings all show the same girl (who resembles none of his models) with black bangs, pinched features, a slack, heavy body and long, almost painfully sensitive hands. She sits motionless and exhausted, her narrow dark eyes smudged with dismay, or wanders across desolate landscapes...