Contemporary American Artists

Yasuo Kuniyoshi has a unique place among American print-makers. His innate sense of style, the directness and sensibility, the personal vision manifest in all his lithographs, render them quite literally apart from the great bulk of factual American prints. There is possibly a reason for this. “I have wished to express,” he once wrote, “the thought of the East, my race, using the tradition of expressing inner thoughts through a full realization of the matter of my experience.” In other words, Knuyioshi is an artist of innate talent, with a point of view conditioned by his early Oriental background, who uses the technique and mode of expression of the Western World. There are in his prints a sure realization of form, sensitiveness to tone and color, and racy and idiomatic draughtsmanship. There is always purity of mood, and above all intensity of feeling. There is, as I have said, a sense of style that is rare among American artists. But all these qualities are given edge and direction by his individual approach, blended of Oriental and American experience. He is thus both American and non-American, and he thereby adds a special note to American graphic art, a new and personal way of looking at things. Take for example the lithograph From the Board Walk. Nothing could be more American in subject matter than these two girls on the beach at Coney Island, yet they have been transformed into something timeless and universal.