Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
1889 - 1953
American painter, photographer and printmaker of Japanese birth. He arrived in the USA in 1906 and studied at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design from 1907 to 1910. He then moved to New York, studying, in rapid succession, with Robert Henri at the National Academy of Design, at the Independent School of Art and from 1916 to 1920 with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League. He supported himself through his later art studies and thereafter as an art photographer. He travelled to Europe in 1925 and again in 1928, settling in Paris, where he studied lithography at the Atelier Desjoubert. After a trip back to Japan in 1931 he worked on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. Paintings such as Fisherman (1924; New York, MOMA) show both his interest in Surrealism and a blend of his two cultures. His massive forms of the late 1930s and early 1940s, as in Circus Girl Resting (Auburn, AL, U. Col.), were borrowed from both Jules Pascin and the figure styles of early Italian Renaissance masters. After World War II his drily applied flat areas of colour were replaced by brilliant and shining golds and purples, and his carnival themes changed from jugglers to masked figures such as Mr Ace (1952; Baltimore, MD, Mus. A.). In New York he taught at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research after 1936 and became the first president of Artists Equity Association between 1947 and 1950. [David M. Sokol. "Kuniyoshi, Yasuo." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T048283.]
Person TypeIndividual
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French, 1864 - 1901
