Painter's Painter

Almost any art-wise person knows something about the Japanese Parisian, Tsugoharu Foujita, painter, cat-lover, ultra-bohemian. Artists know him for a composer of technically slick decorations of cats and pale langorous ladies in a style that is a clever compromise between Post-Impressionist Paris and 18th Century Japan. Parisians know him as an invariable adjunct at Art Balls, masks, revels and routs, a constant habitue of Montparnasse cafes. Tourists know him for the way his hair hangs down over his horn-rimmed glasses; for his habit of wearing checkerboard trousers, leopard-skin vests, earrings. For every hundred people who know something about flamboyant Foujita, perhaps two are acquainted with the work of another expatriate Japanese, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who lives on Manhattan's "left bank," in Brooklyn. Yet if there are Important and Unimportant artists in the U. S., Kuniyoshi ranks easily among the first ten Importants. Discerning showgoers stopped last week at New York's Daniel Galleries to see a representative exhibition of Kuniyoshi's work.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born in Okayama,

Japan, in 1890. Like other boys of his age he passed through high school in a pepper -and -salt kimono. clattering wooden geta (clogs) without definite plans or ambitions. At the age of 16 he set out with a friend to see the world, beginning at Los Angeles. There he went again to public school, with children half his age, to learn English. In class he was set to work drawing apples and cubes. His talent was manifest and a wise teacher told him to become an artist. He did, but few artists have had a harder row to hoe. He went to art school in Los Angeles, made his way to New York, studied there in the studio of Kenneth Hayes Miller. In the meantime he kept himself alive by working as a dishwasher, a grape picker, a ranch hand. "I have done nearly everything but commercial art," he says, "but it is not true when they say I worked as a butler."

In 1919 he married Katherine Schmidt of Xenia, Ohio, whom he met in art school. In the past nine years he has given eight exhibitions. Other painters have come enthusiastically to know him as a ''painter's painter," dismaying at first to the general public and most newspaper critics. He has a fondness for great, strapping, greenish nudes in exotic attitudes, for triangular brown cows in sullen landscapes. Kuniyoshi is as completely unsentimental as Aldous Huxley. His drawing is loose, almost haphazard; his effects come very largely from his uncanny sense of color. To show that he can draw when he wants to, there were on exhibition last week six drawings: vine leaves, bowls of grapes, cucumbers in marble vases, modeled in a soft rich black, drawn with almost the mechanical precision of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Slowly a buying public has grown accustomed to Kuniyoshi's characteristics. Collectors have found that the cows and the nudes have a solidity, a depth, a richness of color that is strangely satisfying. Their dishwashing days over, the Kuniyoshis bought a little place in Woodstock, N. H., last summer, and learned to play golf, sport of the financially secure.

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