The Brooklyn Rail

I can go anywhere that I want
I just got to turn myself inside out and back to front
With cut-out shapes and worn-out spaces
Add some sparkles to create the right effect
And they’re all smiling, so I guess I’ll stay
At least ’til the disappointed have eaten themselves away

—Thom Yorke, “Friend to Friend” (2024)

I want to take a different approach with the work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. I first came across his paintings through a monograph of a 1990 retrospective at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and I’ve been interested in him ever since. He was an established member of the New York art community in the early half of the twentieth century, exhibiting alongside artists including Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Edward Hopper; and at such institutions as MoMA, the Met, and the Whitney. Much of the writing that exists about him frames his practice through his experience as an immigrant. Kuniyoshi sought American citizenship but died before he ever received it, attracting observations of his work as a process to reconcile Japanese imagery, European Modernism, and the formation of New York’s art community and its global significance in the beginning decades of the twentieth century, with his own deep sense of alienation and betrayal. While this is true, it runs the risk of essentialism and misses seeing Kuniyoshi for his greater contributions to twentieth-century art. While Kuniyoshi was trying to hold together his incommensurate experiences, more importantly, it was what was unresolvable that led him to historic breakthroughs in composition and color.

At some point, Kuniyoshi became one of those painters drawn to the medium for its alluring difficulty—he is among those that encountered painting as an engine to process and reveal the dark currents of alienation that culture produces. Like Cézanne and his quixotic desire to invent an Impressionism with weight, or Blake who wanted to merge the line of Poussin with the torque of Michelangelo, Kuniyoshi sought out seemingly impossible dialectics, hoping to generate frisson in what were previously seen as impossible and disparate realities. He came to reject the easy offer, and set about forcing its contradictions to move painting forward. By the end of World War II, Kuniyoshi wanted to maintain two difficult aesthetic experiences. To my knowledge, he is one of the earliest, if not the first, painter to achieve both rigid structure and ethereal space in a painting, and charted a course that would connect the solid, graphic line that existed after Cubism with the airiness of Impressionism and the French Symbolists, reconciling the two languages and all of their complexity within the same work—taking the graphic dynamism of Kurt Schwitters and proto-Cubism and merging it with his interest in the smudgy, romantic space of Odilon Redon.

Kuniyoshi’s early works had a characteristic softness to them. He began with paintings of cows during the year of the cow, before shifting to Botero-like children and still lives. He was interested in these subjects for the complexity of their frailty—all could be easily overlooked or underestimated, but all contained rich interiority within their innocence. As his practice matured and he felt more connected to New York through his community at the Art Students League and his marriage to Katherine Schmidt, he began painting women, at first from life and then imagined. Schmidt’s marriage to Kuniyoshi cost her the support of her family and her country—she lost her US citizenship when they married. He had started painting in thin layers before their divorce in 1932, but he really began to own this as a distinctive style by the mid-1930s. In works like Daily News (1935) and Girl Wearing Bandana (1936), Kuniyoshi began to achieve his characteristic interest in depicting his subjects with the vitality of the sketch and the immediate impression. Each mark keeps the bristled end of brushes spreading apart with pressure, layered on absorbent grounds to reveal their direction and imprint. It is this thin idea of painting that Kuniyoshi would spend the next three decades mastering. It is a trajectory in tandem with his friend Ben Shahn, as both searched for ways to make a truth within the subjects that they painted—a type of pristine and patient layering that feels afraid of setting up or establishing deeper roots. Kuniyoshi built up each layer of paint so that it could be wiped away and reapplied to form a shimmer, a type of doubt, or maybe an acknowledgment that the portrait is always a metaphysical back and forth—where the ideas that the artist has of their subject shift and are informed by the experience of looking and the evolving reality of the person across from them. Kuniyoshi watched the first person to love him in America lose everything for it. It is impossible to fully know how much of a role this played within his work, but his paintings seemed totally absent of anything solid during this time.

Kuniyoshi began adopting hard edges in his work during the Second World War, but resolved it with a way of painting that was cumulous, diaphanous, veiled, but scarred. Deliverance (1947) begins with a stripe, or more accurately, a cross of buildings, that segment the painting into zones. In the lower right-hand corner, a ticket or a poster. The city, if it is that, is more a vaulted tomb than an outdoor space. There are no cast shadows in this world. Everyone walks as if in a de Chirico, hovering above the plane without physical footing, like they’re spirits in another space and time. The workers carry a bag between them: laundry, but carried like Christ’s body being lowered from the cross. To the left, another figure carries a bag at an awkward angle. We view them walking away from us and at a distance, like the supporting figures in a Fra Angelico or a della Francesca. It looks as if the body is pulling a pillowcase off of itself, or a figure turned into the bag itself. But seen from behind and carrying such weight, it is also reminiscent of Ukiyo-e prints, like the figure walking with a basket in Hiroshige’s Otsu (ca. 1840) at the Met. Kuniyoshi’s understanding of these figures is more than a deep empathy—it is the accumulation of his experiences knowing poverty and difficult labor when he moved to America at seventeen.

Deliverance is a complicated pastiche of techniques, manifesting difference through its multiple languages of mark-making that together, form a kind of plural painting. Each figure is a cloud contained within a harsh silhouette. Boundaries of style are formed by the thin paint of the woman’s green blouse canceling out the the brown of the underpainting showing through, the cursive in the knot tying up her apron, the efficiency of the mark that defines her hip, and the way red burns through the dark in the upper-right landscape, then switches in the bottom-right to burnishing the canvas. This isn’t an easy painting to make. It’s four or five ideas of making a picture held together as one. Kuniyoshi was open to influence and seemed distrustful of harmony, looking for ways to assimilate the different aspects of painting that he enjoyed. It required presence at every step, relating zone to zone and solving difficulty with a careful and masterful balance between responsiveness and planning.

Where Deliverance introduces the hard edge of the cross composition, Fakirs (1951) realizes it into a formative style. It is one of Kuniyoshi’s carnival paintings, named for a ceremony put on each year by the other members of New York’s Art Students League: a ritual of mockery, where the young avant garde jested at the old academicians of the ateliers and salons. He had painted circuses before, but that was when he was young and married and hopeful—they were beautiful and vibrant then. The carnivals he painted after 1947 were sinister. He had experienced bouts of deep depression during the war and the time of Asian Internment camps, and returned to the scene of the carnival through piles of mocking devils with threatening edges. The largest figure in the clump has a hat like a caravel and a sharp needle for a nose that pierces soft form like a Suprematist collage. The small figure to the right has a white face, a mask or a depiction of Oshiroi—which would signify cultural expectations of beauty. The central figure holds a horn against their shoulder like a loaded rifle. He has the pose of a standard bearer, holding the wrapped flag in a hanging veil of refracted Big Top colors. The other hand is raised in salute. The number five in the character’s leg may be a reference to Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold or the fire engines that inspired it. In this painting and others, Kuniyoshi often suggests the existence of other paintings elsewhere, running half images off the sides of the canvas or cropping bodies or figures in a way that carry you off the edge. It is a fragmentation that transfers a sequence to some other place, a painting to be made later, or an elsewhere of images we cannot access.

Kuniyoshi’s carnival paintings share a similar affect to those of the artists working through the Weimar Republic, who witnessed the ascent of the Nazi party—artists such as Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Wacker, Rudolf Dischinger, or Karl Völker. Like them, Kuniyoshi witnessed the terror of infantilized sadism, the tottering Pere Ubus of power that had been let loose to stumble like wrecking balls throughout the world. Kuniyoshi’s figures look like they smell like formaldehyde; glancing with slitted eyes and smiling with cold dead teeth. They are vibrant tormentors moving in a ghost-like charade. Life seems absent from them. Their shadowlessness implies they’re barely there, more psychically real than physically present. I looked at a printed-out image of Fakirs until I fell asleep, and had two dreams of close friends betraying me that night. How quickly the mocking carnival looks for its next target—they never run out of them.

There is something restless to each of his paintings, especially those made after the Second World War. He seems bored by harmony and easy painting, driven to pull off something difficult. Kuniyoshi enjoyed the work of Odilon Redon when he was in Paris, and seems to have taken from it the intimate experience of subtle and shifting tones. But then Kuniyoshi does the unthinkable, injecting Redon’s limited value range and subtlety with intense chroma, mania, and a sense of dread. He had started buying his paint from a new company called Ponsol Shiva, which made his colors glow and clash with each other. The viewer has to keep up with all of these different patchworks, and feel the thrum of the artist’s externalized alienation and deep heartbreak. The color after 1948 is trying to destabilize the image. Red and blue are uncertain of each other—dismissive and colliding. Dark red and pale blue always do mystic spatial things. Dirty viridian sneaks around. It is difficult to know what emerges and what sinks, and Kuniyoshi uses these tricky colors to disguise how fetid and stagnant the rotting corpses are underneath. Each zone negates the other, a dialectic that makes form compete and dissolve.

Between Fakirs and Deliverance, Kuniyoshi painted Revelation (1949), a more literal and tormented crucifixion scene of splayed bodies that seem to in some ways be a stand-in for the artist. It may have been a Noh mask, given to Yasuo by a student, that would appear in a number of his works over the next decade. It seems to be the only time he introduces a mask in a sympathetic way, a face that belies the pain beneath it. More often there is rot behind the carnival masks. There are wolves in hiding. Under their masks they seem to weep and grind their teeth. The slashing tarps and wrinkles feel chiseled out of the wood block. Kuniyoshi’s late paintings depict a torn space, where images are rubbed into a surface of shards. Color emerges and burns through deep grays. It feels like the weight of a life’s worth of suspicion getting pulled out into the light. A student of mine recently told me that they felt that when they address their life in China, they feel pressured to also incorporate their criticism of the Chinese government. I thought of Kuniyoshi, feeling the need to be more patriotic than his peers throughout his life, and how little things have changed. What are the terms of full acceptance, and do the snares of the mob’s suspicion ever fully go away?

Kuniyoshi found the overlap between the strong shapes of Cubism and kakemono painting, and then reconciled this graphic outline with his interests in Redon, the soft spaces of scraped-down romantic painting, and his friend Ben Shahn. It may be the first experience like it in painting—a versatile, multivalent language developed by an artist who felt pressed upon from every side. He was called Yas by his friends. There was love and the warmth near the center of things for a while, that made the cold feel that much colder at the end. For Yas, contradiction and difference was something to be attained, not avoided. He kept transparency, and merged it with hard-edge compositions, finding a space that worked in a gap that feels impossible, to make a language that still feels contemporary today. He made ghosts captured in static vessels; soft intimacies trapped within unflinching walls but filled with undiminished experience. There was eternal power hiding within the plural. In his essay “Universality in Art,” he wrote: “Here is my fist against the light casting a shadow upon the table. The fist is west and the table is east. Fist is actuality, it has form and exists in space, while the shadow is shape, sometimes it has depth and it is diffused with mystery.”