Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Japanese-born American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi was also a photographer and printmaker after learning weaving and dyeing in Japan. He immigrated to the US in 1906, before serving his compulsory military service, and started to study painting at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. In 1910, Kuniyoshi moved to the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York, where he later also taught. His early drawings and paintings often used plants and animals as subjects. In the 1920s, he travelled to Europe and returned to Japan for a year in 1931.

In 1935, Kuniyoshi became one of the founding members of the American Artists Congress, and served as the first president of the Artists Equity from 1947-51. He became best known for his still lifes of utilitarian objects and his female nudes. With the beginning of World War II, Kuniyoshi developed a deep social and political consciousness. He was branded an “enemy alien” by the US government in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, although he was previously active against war and fascism. He created his own pictorial symbols, rooted in Japanese pictorial tradition, to express his beliefs.

Kuniyoshi’s Self-Portrait as a Golf Player was painted in 1927 in oil on canvas (127.6 x 102.2 cm). The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.