This is a portrait of a young Japanese American woman presented from the chest up. Her dark hair has tendrils framing her face and some loose strands falling to her shoulders rendered with loose, expressive brushstrokes. Her skin tone is light with a subtle blush on her cheeks. Her expression is calm, her eyes directed slightly upward and to our right. Her lips are painted a bold, reddish-orange. She is wearing a collared shirt with a loosely-woven, plaid pattern in muted colors— primarily shades of grey, burgundy, and muted reddish-orange. The plaid pattern is not precisely uniform; the brushwork suggests a certain casualness in the texture of the fabric. The background is a very pale, almost off-white, and deliberately understated, focusing our attention entirely on the woman. Anti-Japanese racism in America following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by imperial Japan resulted in one of the nation’s most regrettable chapters. Under the guise of “national security,” roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, 79,000 of them U.S. citizens, were identified by the government, given 6 days to put their affairs in order – sell houses, close businesses, contact family – collect what few possessions they could carry, then sent to remote military zones, mostly across the Western U.S. Anyone at least 1/16th Japanese was taken. Officially termed “relocation centers,” the prisoners were held in concentration camps full of innocent civilians with no charges made against them and held against their will, indefinitely, in miserable conditions, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. One of these camps was known as Amache, near Granada, CO, 220 miles southeast of Denver. One of the prisoners there was the Japanese-born American artist Tokio Ueyama … and another was this unidentified young woman who posed for this memorable oil portrait on January 17, 1944 at camp Amache.

Untitled (Amache Portrait) by Tokio Ueyama (Japanese American) - Oil on canvas / January 17, 1944 - Denver Art Museum (Colorado) #WomenInArt #art #artwork #TokioUeyama #Ueyama #portraitofaWoman #JapaneseAmericanArt #DenverArtMuseum #BlueskyArt #JapaneseAmerican #artText #JapaneseAmericanArtist

Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s playful experiments across multiple paintings of “modern” bathers (aka swimmers) demonstrate the artist’s sly sense of humor and were born from summers at a coastal art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. We see a young curvaceous woman in a brown 1920s-style one-piece swimsuit, standing on a brown rock. The woman has large almond eyes, long straight black hair, and a bit of belly. She is prominently holding a cigarette in her right hand with her left hand behind her head. Her right leg is bent at the knee, and her left leg is straight as if she is surfing or simply posing for the artist. The background is a green and dark tone expanse under a blue sky and white clouds. Solid forms, a flattened sense of space, and a dark palette mark this work as belonging to Kuniyoshi’s early career. The tight swimsuit and small cigarette refer to newly relaxed norms of seaside behavior. For some, the boldly un-self-conscious bather next to a minuscule clamshell hints at famous Italian Renaissance works such as Sandro Botticelli’s 1486 “Birth of Venus.” Born in Okayama, Japan in 1889, Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States in 1906 at 17, reportedly to avoid having to join the Japanese military. After a brief stay in Seattle and three years in Los Angeles, Kuniyoshi eventually moved to New York City, where he studied with American artists Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Although viewed as an immigrant, Kuniyoshi was very patriotic and identified himself as an American. He never received his citizenship due to exclusionary U.S. immigration laws. His first wife, American artist Katherine Schmidt, actually lost her American citizenship in 1919 due to her relationship with Kuniyoshi. They divorced in 1932 and a few years later he married American dancer and actress Sara Mazo. Despite being denied citizenship, during World War II, Kuniyoshi demonstrated his loyalty and patriotism for the United States as an anti-Japanese propaganda artist.

“Bather with Cigarette” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Japanese-American) - Oil on canvas / 1924 - Dallas Museum of Art (Texas) #WomenInArt #art #ArtText #OilPainting #womensart #YasuoKuniyoshi #Kuniyoshi #surfer #DallasMuseumofArt #kuniyoshi #smoking #国吉康雄 #JapaneseAmericanArtist #JapaneseAmericanArt #humor