Yasuo Kuniyoshi was influential in the American Modernist movement, painting vivid, dynamic images from his home base of New York. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1889, he came to New York in 1910 to study art at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. A decade later, he rose to prominence as an American artist who incorporated Japanese design into American folk art images, and served as a vital link between the contemporary art worlds of New York and Japan. In 1929, he was chosen to be one of the “19 Living Artists” for a MoMA exhibition, and had solo exhibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s. When suddenly designated an “enemy alien” at the start of World War II, Kuniyoshi threw his energy into creating anti-Japanese war posters for the Office of War Information. In 1948, he became the first living artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, though he never achieved his wish to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The subject of this entry was featured in one of our digital exhibits, “Japanese Artists During the Prewar Period in New York City- Artistic Trace from the 1910s to the 1940s –”.