Becoming American: The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Chapter One Painting American

CHAPTER ONE 8IQV\QVO)UMZQKIV It might be said that one of the disillusions Kuniyoshi suffered during the war was that witnessing the American government’s treatment of people of Japanese descent made him acutely realize he had always been racialized. Kuniyoshi’s artistic career had developed in a New Deal–progressive milieu and was nurtured by many prominent liberals and leftists in the New York and New England art circles. Since the 1920s, Kuniyoshi and his colleagues had been deploying the modernist trope of universalism to define American art—an ideological stance in contention with the more nationalistic viewpoint of conservative artists and critics, represented by vocal proponents such as art critic Thomas Craven and artist Thomas Hart Benton. Now that the Pearl Harbor attack blew wide open the “American artist” moniker that had masked, or at least selectively minimized, Kuniyoshi’s “otherness,” his racialized identity became highly undesirable, yet highly unavoidable, in almost every aspect of his wartime life. This is not to say, however, that Kuniyoshi was impervious to the extent his race and nationality factored into Americans’ perception and reception of him and his work even before Pearl Harbor. Reviewers of his art, including some who were his friends, had insistently attributed his pictorial qualities to his Japanese origin; nebulous and unqualified phrases like “Oriental in spirit” and “occidental in technique ” were used to characterize his art. Kuniyoshi himself, on the other hand, had carefully constructed a (counter)narrative of his full integration, in art and in person , into “American ways of living,” as he called it. In his autobiographical article “East to West,” published in Magazine of Art in 1940, he recounted his journey from Japan to America, where he found friendships and camaraderie that lasted for decades. He went as far as declaring that when he returned from a short (and 26 Chapter One FIGURE 5 Q Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Self-Portrait as a Photographer, 1924. Oil on canvas, 20 3/8 x 30 1/4 in. (51.8 x 76.8 cm). Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982 (1984.433.11). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource, N.Y. only) visit to Japan in 1931, he was “firmly convinced” that America was his home and he “no longer belonged” to his native country and culture, especially because, since his parents had died shortly after his visit, his deepest tie with his native land “had been broken.”1 In some of his early self-portraits, Kuniyoshi shows a conscious interrogation, by means of a pictorial body and accompanying motifs, of his identity formation— or his process of becoming American. A case in point is Kuniyoshi’s Self-Portrait as a Photographer (1924), a painting that accompanied his “East to West” article, which points to provocative questions about the artist’s conscious representation of identity (Fig. 5). Kuniyoshi painted himself in the middle of photographing what seems like a landscape painting. He looks outward beyond the picture frame, but his gaze does not quite engage the viewer. Peeking out below the dark cloth that covers his head, he stares in the direction of his raised right arm, which forms a directional curve that points back to his photographic subject. Photographing paintings, mostly by his artist friends in New York, was a helpful source of income Painting American 27 for Kuniyoshi before World War II. However, the landscape in this self-portrait has pictorial characteristics of Kuniyoshi’s own work from early 1920s, with curvilinear lines and gentle gradation of shading, suggesting that he might be documenting his own art. A self-portrait that depicts the artist photographing his own painting is an unusually self-reflective work in Kuniyoshi’s oeuvre. It is curious that instead of depicting himself in the act of painting, as seen in At Work for example, here Kuniyoshi puts forth the identification “photographer.” Yet he was becoming one of the most promising painters in American art when he created this work, only two years after his well-received debut at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1922. Self-Portrait as a Photographer seems to be an exploratory piece, as Kuniyoshi tried to figure (act) out what kind of an artist he wanted to be. His inclusion of photographic accoutrements—the camera, the shutter release, the dark cloth—adds to the staging of a pictorial investigation of his artistic...