Word: kuniyoshi
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Never before had Manhattan's Whitney Museum held a retrospective show of a living painter. To break its precedent, the museum chose a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who ranks among the top dozen U.S. artists. For the painter, the exhibition was a test as well as a tribute. Would his life work, spread out on the walls, seem worth the effort it represented? "I had a butterfly in my stomach," Kuniyoshi confessed last week, "just thinking about...
...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...
...House Appropriations Committee, wrestled with an esthetic problem. The State Department wanted money to strengthen U.S. cultural contacts with Europe and Latin America. "The committee never intended to have anything like that done with the taxpayer's money," said Stefan, looking with horror at Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi's bit of exaggerated expressionism...