Sad Man

Never before had Manhattan's Whitney Museum held a retrospective show of a living painter. To break its precedent, the museum chose a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who ranks among the top dozen U.S. artists. For the painter, the exhibition was a test as well as a tribute. Would his life work, spread out on the walls, seem worth the effort it represented? "I had a butterfly in my stomach," Kuniyoshi confessed last week, "just thinking about it."

He need not have worried; the critics were "kind"; Kuniyoshi's artist friends, who call him "Yas" (for Yasuo), were jubilant. What gloom there was, and there was plenty, emanated from the pictures themselves.

Club in Hand. "My paintings are sad," Kuniyoshi explains simply, "because I am a sad man. I feel very lonely." Kuniyoshi, twice-married, is president of the 850-member Artists' Equity, and a thoroughly sociable member of the Greenwich Village-Woodstock, N.Y. artists' set. His loneliness may go back to the day in 1906 when he arrived in the U.S. from Japan, a friendless boy of 13, to seek his fortune.

He kept himself alive as a dishwasher, engine cleaner, grape picker, ranch hand and art photographer--and studied painting at night. "I have done nearly everything except commercial art," he recalls, "but it is not true when they say I worked as a butler."

Kuniyoshi made his reputation in the 1920s with relatively cheerful designs featuring plump ladies in swimming, cows, babies and trapeze artists fitted together in orientally flat, bird's-eye perspectives. They caught collectors' fancies, earned him money and leisure enough to take up golf. In one self-portrait he carries a golf club as proudly as a samurai sword.

Now 54, Kuniyoshi looks rather like a prematurely aged Japanese schoolboy. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and a porkpie hat, smokes a pipe, and says he has "no time" for golf any more. He is too busy working, nine hours a day, on the sorts of pictures that fill most of his Whitney show: ragged, melancholy still lifes, Western landscapes and dusky figure paintings. Each painting begins with a detailed charcoal drawing from the model, which he modifies from month to month as he sees fit. "I play with my paintings," he says, "and I sometimes have a dozen of them going all at once."

Ruin on the Table. His still lifes at the Whitney might each have been assembled from a ruin and tied together with string --pipes, masks, torn letters, weather vanes and carnival prizes teetering on Victorian tables. Kuniyoshi's figure paintings all show the same girl (who resembles none of his models) with black bangs, pinched features, a slack, heavy body and long, almost painfully sensitive hands. She sits motionless and exhausted, her narrow dark eyes smudged with dismay, or wanders across desolate landscapes.

An ardent if melancholy liberal, Kuniyoshi damned Japanese aggression from the start, and exhibited his paintings for United China Relief. Classified as an enemy alien during the war, he wrote propaganda broadcasts for OWI which had to be translated into the language he has almost forgotten. Says Kuniyoshi: "I am just as much an American in my approach and thinking as the next fellow." Under the existing law, he can never become a U.S. citizen.

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