The Shores of a Dream: Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Early Work in America

The Shores of a Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Early Works in America considers the paintings and drawings that Kuniyoshi produced before his first trip to Europe in 1925. As he began to develop his painting style, the young artist also executed a series of pen-and-ink drawings that were finished works of art in themselves. Kuniyoshi’s sensuous still lifes and fanciful landscapes fused the principles of American modernism with artistic elements from folk art and from his Japanese heritage. His works are by turns humorous, fantastic, and serenely elegant, and always worthy of close examination.
The Shores of a Dream reveals the range of Kuniyoshi’s early work, from broadly painted canvases that echo American folk painting to pen-and-ink works reminiscent of Japanese sumi ink drawing or touched with delicate washes of color. Comparative examples from traditional Japanese art and Kuniyoshi’s contemporaries, including Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keefe, and Marsden Hartley, suggest how he fused both traditional and modernist artistic principles into a style uniquely his own.