Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi retrospective
A retrospective of artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi's works shows how he remained faithful to his adopted country, despite his shocking treatment
America claims Yasuo Kuniyoshi as one of its great artists of the past century, but the country really has no right to do so.
The Japanese-born painter, one of the most idiosyncratic and expressive artists of his time, moved to the United States as a teenager in 1906 and lived there until his death in 1953. But he was denied citizenship, declared an enemy alien during the second world war, and when he married an American woman in 1919, she was stripped of her citizenship and disowned by her family for years.
His most productive years in the US coincided with an ugly age of racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia. Yet he remained faithful to his adopted country, contributed art to the war effort and considered himself all American.
Kuniyoshi's art, on display in a powerful new retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until August 30, feels deeply American, or at least as American as it is anything else. And if it's any recompense for the shameful way the artist was treated, this exhibition does justice to his legacy, showing how he added immeasurably to the breadth and richness of the American visual canon.
"The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi", billed as the first major American survey of Kuniyoshi's work in more than 65 years, is a thoroughly satisfying show. Not one work disappoints, not one fails to reward long study; even seemingly modest works, small drawings and still lifes in pencil and ink, are expansively powerful, sometimes even more thrilling than the largest and most dramatic of his paintings.
