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CHAPTER FIVE ?MIZQVO\PM5I[S[ The postwar years brought Kuniyoshi even more critical recognition that further embellished his already illustrious career in spite of his trying wartime experience. In 1946, the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs purchased three of Kuniyoshi’s works and included them in its traveling exhibition Advancing American Art. In 1947, Kuniyoshi became the founding president of the Artists Equity Association (AEA), a nationwide organization aimed at promoting artists’ professional development and assisting artists in their relations with their patrons, such as dealers and museums. To be elected by the AEA’s members, consisting of American artists of a wide range of styles and media, testified to the high regard his contemporaries had for him. The Whitney Museum of American Art honored him with a retrospective in 1948—the institution ’s very first one-person show for a living American artist. And in 1952, he represented American art at the 26th Venice Biennale, alongside fellow artists Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder, and Edward Hopper. Receiving a spot on this “national art team” was as close to a state-recognized American status as Kuniyoshi could have received. In Kuniyoshi’s postwar work, however, one sees overwhelming depression and pessimism that undercut and contradicted the critical success Kuniyoshi enjoyed. On the one hand, Kuniyoshi could not have asked for more concrete validation of his American artist status than all the critical recognition he received in the late 1940s. In addition to the Whitney retrospective and the State Department purchase, Kuniyoshi was voted, in a Look magazine poll, the top third of the “Best Painters in America Today”—behind John Marin and Max Weber—by artists, art critics, and museum directors.1 On the other hand, the continuing shift in his pictorial language and subject matter suggests an underlying disillusion that stemmed in part 118 Chapter Five from his unmet expectations of what Americans would do in the postwar years. He told Goodrich that he tried to express in his paintings a belief in the strength and courage that mankind shared—the kind of humanism that he had maintained throughout the war years. We must go on, Kuniyoshi insisted, “must have faith in humanity and must go on.” But his lament, that the “war ended, hoping for [a] new world but nothing really came,” is a stark contrast to his overdeterminedly hopeful outlook and indicates that an important part of his liberal vision of an American democracy stayed unrealized.2 With the defeat of Japan, there seemed to be even more justification to do away with exclusionary laws and policies that targeted specific racial groups. Yet Japanese immigrants still would not be allowed to apply for American citizenship until the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act in June of 1952, less than a year before Kuniyoshi’s death in May of 1953.3 More significant than his personal legal status, Kuniyoshi’s disillusionment was most underscored by the controversies he was unwittingly embroiled in that surrounded the State Department’s Advancing American Art. The exhibition ignited one of the major partisan battles over what constituted American art and, more importantly, “Americanness” at the beginning of a decades-long Cold War. The fierce political battles that arose with the exhibition and the series of attacks targeting Kuniyoshi and his progressive compatriots created yet another identity crisis that challenged Kuniyoshi’s definition and ideals of “Americanness” in the postwar years. The conservative right’s “red hunt” and the burgeoning Cold War would severely test Kuniyoshi’s faith in the American ideals he had so vehemently espoused and promoted throughout his career. Return to Carnivals and Masked Clowns Coinciding with the trying historical circumstances was Kuniyoshi’s return to his beloved subjects of carnivals and circuses after years of delicate still lifes, pensive figures, and barren landscapes. Using circus and carnival performers (clowns and harlequins) as a means to convey ambivalent attitudes toward life and the world had been an important tradition of European and American modern art since the nineteenth century.4 Kuniyoshi had also created many circus figures in the 1920s, but he devoted his full energy to developing the motif and symbolism of the clown and the circus/carnival scenes only in the late 1940s. There was a sense of naiveté and straightforwardness in his early circus-themed imagery, as he rendered his figures in gentle lines and simpler coloration—perhaps reflecting a happier, more innocent and uncomplicated time. His postwar clowns...

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