America with a Lilt

When the trustees of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art started planning for a show of "Nineteen Living Americans" in 1929, one candidate among the artists gave them pause. Could Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi be considered an American? "I have worked and lived here since I was a boy," Kuniyoshi argued. "I am just as much American in my approach and thinking as the next fellow." He got into the show--and went on to win a reputation as a man who lived in the busiest and most bustling of nations and pictured it as a land of long and silent dreams (see color). Last week Boston University was assembling 65 of his paintings and drawings for the biggest Kuniyoshi show in the U.S. since his death from cancer in 1953. The show will open next month.

The son of an Okayama peddler of dried chestnuts and cereals, Kuniyoshi got his first glimpse of the U.S. through the prosperous-looking tourists who came into town. When the time came for him to be called up into the imperial army, he decided that the U.S. was where he wanted to be. His father managed to scrape together $200 for him, but Kuniyoshi was so confident about the land of opportunity that just after he landed in Seattle in 1906 he sent all but $50 back.

Heady Bunch. He got a job as sweeper and water carrier in a Spokane railroad yard, where his only bedroom was a tent, his mattress a bundle of straw. He worked as a porter, scrubbed floors, saved enough money to get to Los Angeles. There a teacher in the public school, which he was attending to learn English, noticed how skillfully he drew the little figures to illustrate maps. The teacher got him into the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. Though he still had to work as a bellhop in winter and a fruit picker in summer, Kuniyoshi's career as a painter had begun.

In 1910 he had made his way to Manhattan, and before long fell in with a group of young men who were all destined to become famous: Stuart Davis, Morris Kantor, Alexander Brook, Reginald Marsh and Walt Kuhn. It was a heady bunch to belong to, but Kuniyoshi's paintings were to be his own.

Irregular Cow. Like the artists of Japan, he was fascinated with detail--every petal on the flower, every insect in the grass. He painted cows endlessly (he was born in the Year of the Cow), gave them such childlike titles as The Calf Doesn't Want to Go. "The horse is a splendid animal, but the cow is irregular. You can make more out of it," he said. In an early self-portrait of himself as a golfer, he made himself look like a Japanese war lord, his mashie like a samurai sword.

Gradually his primitivism disappeared, but no matter how mature his brush became or how rich his palette, his paintings never lost their Oriental lilt. His women were sensuous and thoroughly American, but they were nearly always by themselves, sad and impassive. What impressed him about the West was not its crops and bellowing herds, but sullen stillness before a prairie storm or an eerie milk train passing in the night. Kuniyoshi's America seemed to have neither skyscraper nor factory. It was a land where fantasy stretched from horizon to horizon and a child played mindlessly in the ruins of a ghost town.

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