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EPILOGUE *MKWUQVO)UMZQKIV' On the occasion of making Kuniyoshi the first living American artist to hold a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1948, curator Lloyd Goodrich apparently felt compelled to reinforce Kuniyoshi’s “Americanness.” He rehashed the allegiance issue, likely in direct response to the allegations from the Dondero/ conservative camp, and insisted on Kuniyoshi’s American credentials by stating that Kuniyoshi “long felt himself an American in every other respect,” even though he was still legally a resident alien in 1948. Goodrich further bolstered his institution ’s decision to give its first-ever living artist retrospective to Kuniyoshi by acknowledging the artist’s strong belief in a “democratic way of life” and patriotic wartime activities. Goodrich asserted that Kuniyoshi chose to speak up during the war because to the artist “belief in the democratic cause outweighed any conceivable loyalty to a government to which he was utterly opposed.”1 In other words, Kuniyoshi was the fruit of American democracy, whose high degrees of artistic achievement and cultural assimilation evidenced a society in which individual freedom thrived and different cultures converged. Of course, Goodrich did not volunteer a crucial piece of information in his curatorial statement: Kuniyoshi had been a friend for more than twenty years and had had close ties with the Whitney for decades. Juliana Force, in addition to being a member of the Whitney Studio Club in the early 1920s, was the founding director of the Whitney Museum in 1931, had financially contributed to Kuniyoshi’s European trips, and sponsored his show at the Downtown Gallery in 1942 benefiting the United China Relief funds. Until her death in August 1948, Force remained a major supporter of Kuniyoshi’s work. Goodrich attended the Art Students League in New York (1931–1935) and studied, alongside Kuniyoshi, under Kenneth Hayes Miller. Goodrich had been a curator at the Whitney Museum since 1935 (he Becoming American? 139 became its associate director in 1948 and served as director from 1958 to 1968) and had urged the museum to change its policy against one-man exhibitions of living artists. He got the green light from Force in 1947. “The first victim was Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who was a close friend of all of us,” Goodrich joked endearingly in a later interview.2 The Whitney retrospective had several ulterior propagandistic aims. Speaking on behalf of a museum devoted to promoting American art, Goodrich certified Kuniyoshi’s identity as an American artist. At the same time, Kuniyoshi and his retrospective were deployed as a direct rebuttal and challenge to conservatives’ attacks on Advancing American Art and to reactionary critics’ cry for an overtly nationalistic American art, such as that touted by art critic Thomas Craven, that excluded foreign-born or noncitizen artists.3 Kuniyoshi was a willing participant in the counteroffensives. He indeed recognized his self-imposed responsibility in a 1948 interview: These are times when all progressive people must recognize their obligation to their ideals. Perhaps because I was born in Japan I feel so deeply the need to preserve the traditional American freedoms. I feel this obligation, even when I want more time for painting.4 In other words, Kuniyoshi served as an example, or even a representative, of the kind of art and progressivism that Goodrich and his New York cohorts wanted to promote in American art. And it certainly further secured Kuniyoshi’s canonical status—at least in the immediate postwar years—that also contributed to his earning a spot on the national team to represent American art at the 1952 Venice Biennale. The press by and large reviewed the Whitney show positively. Robert M. Coates, writing for the New Yorker, thought it was an excellent selection on the Whitney Museum’s part to give its first living-artist retrospective to Kuniyoshi. “Kuniyoshi is certainly one of the foremost painters in America,” Coates proclaimed , and deserved the honor.5 Judith Kaye Reed, reviewing for Art Digest, offered an even more definitive validation: “There should be few to quarrel with the selection of Yasuo Kuniyoshi as the first living American painter to be honored by a retrospective showing at the Whitney Museum.” Reed called Kuniyoshi an “individual artist,” for despite the “diverse influences played upon him” in his American art education, Kuniyoshi “remained consistently himself.” Those influences from American “primitives” (folk art–inspired), Jules Pascin, Oriental, and modern art might have enriched Kuniyoshi’s oeuvre, but his individuality, Reed argued, remained the most distinctive and valuable quality in Kuniyoshi’s art. In...

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