Kongo: Power and Majesty

By Charles Kessler

Kongo: Power and Majesty at the Metropolitan Museum (through January 3rd) is a major exhibition with 146 works borrowed from sixty different sources in the United States and Europe. Such an exhibition is well-deserved. Central Africa's Kongo civilization had one of the world's great art traditions, and a long one – going back as late as the 15th century and extending to the early twentieth. Below is a selection of the work I found most interesting; many more reproductions can be found here.

I was surprised to learn that the 15th century was a time of mutual friendship and respect between the Kongo peoples and Portugal, and, later, other European countries, and Christianity was accepted as a welcome addition to Kongo culture. The earliest works in the exhibition were items given by Kongo kings to fellow sovereigns in Europe who prized them for their invention and refined craftsmanship, and who prominently displayed them.

Oliphant, 16th Century, ivory, 32 ⅝ x 3 inches (Palazzo Pitti, Florence).

This beautiful 16th-century ivory trumpet is a purely decorative luxury object and, according to the exhibition website, "it likely entered the Medici collections in Florence as a token of appreciation from the Kongo sovereign Afonso I (r. 1509–42) to Pope Leo X (r. 1513–21), the former Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, for appointing his son Henrique a bishop."

By the 17th century, however, European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade had a catastrophic impact on the Kongo civilization. It decimated the population, destroyed the traditional economic and political system, and lead to the abandonment of traditional arts like woodcarving and metal work by the early 20th century. In the meantime, Kongo artists took inspiration from Christian and other European imagery.

Beginning in the mid-15th century, with the baptism of some of the Kongo royalty, thousands of Christian devotional objects were sent from Portugal to the Kingdom of Kongo. Kongo artists soon reinterpreted them for their own culture, as can be seen in this expressive crucifix.

Christ, 18th-19th century, open-back cast brass, 4 ⅜ x 4 ½ x ⅞ inches (Metropolitan Museum no. 1999.295.3).

Below, the head on the woman's body is probably a lion – which is interesting because lions weren't indigenous to this part of Africa; the imagery was probably derived from European iconography.

Staff Finial - Kneeling Figure with Feline Head, 19th century, ivory and stone, 7 ½ x 2 ⅛ x 2 ⅜ inches (Smithsonian Museum of African Art).

On the left: Master of Kasadi atelier, Mask, 19th - early 20th century, wood, pigments, buffalo hide and hair, metal tacks, 11 ⅜ x 6 ⅞ x 5 ½ inches (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium). On the right: Master of Kasadi atelier, Mask, 19th - early 20th century, wood and pigments, 10 ½ x 7 ½ x 5 ½ inches (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium).

Although we don't know the names of the artists who made most of this work, we do know that these masks were made in a specific workshop – the Master of Kasadi atelier.  They were collected by the Belgian Protestant missionary Léo Bittremieux in the village of Kasadi. The white chalk on the faces of the masks has a spiritual dimension having to do with purity, virtue, and the land of the dead where powerful spiritual forces reside.

Left: Scepter - Seated Chief above Bound Prisoner, 19th - early 20th century, ivory and resin, 11 ¼ x 2 x 2 ⅛ inches (private collection); right: detail of back showing bound prisoner.

The imagery in this carved ivory scepter speaks of power: a bound and gagged slave (right photo above) is behind an enthroned chief thus embodying the chief's power to keep his dependents from harm by subjugating rivals. The tip of the scepter contained a packet of medicines that empowered the chief, and the vine that the chief is chewing on was used to repel witches.

Ancestral Shrine Figure, 19th - early 20th century, wood, pigment, 20 ½ x 6 ¾ x 6 ¾ inches (Museum Rietberg, Zürich).

Female figures, which were symbols of the cycle of life, were used as burial shrines. This one simply and beautifully depicts a sense of loss.

Installation view, Kongo Power Figures, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The greater part of this exhibition, and a major coup, is an installation of fifteen of the twenty 19th-century "Power Figures," or Mangaaka, that are known to exist. The Mangaaka were created as a response to the turmoil caused by colonialism. They acted as conduits to the spirit realm for the purpose of aiding petitioners against opponents, settling conflicts, and protecting the community from European colonizers. 

Power Figure - Mangaaka, 19th century, wood, iron, resin, cowrie shell, animal hide and hair, ceramic textile and pigment, 44 ⅛ x 18 ⅞ x 14 ⅛ (Museo Preistorico, Rome).

The power figures were a collaboration between artists who carved and adorned the figure, and priests (ngango) who invested them with sacred powers. The Mangaaka were relatively large, around four feet tall, and they aggressively lean forward as if prepared to confront challenges. (This can be seen better in the installation view above.) Their stomach cavities and hollows behind their eyes contained sacred materials which were activated by hammering a nail into the figure.

Power Figure, 19th century, wood, iron, resin, cowrie shell, animal hide and hair, ceramic, plant fiber, textile and pigment, 43 ¾ x 15 ⅜ x 11 inches (Dallas Museum of Art).

The colonial powers considered these figures so powerful that they would promptly seize them during military campaigns. But when possible, the ngango removed the sacred materials, as well as the beards and outer garments, before it was confiscated, thereby deactivating their powers.

Modern Dance, Reality & Authenticity

By Charles Kessler

I’ve been going to a lot of dance performances lately – about 20 of them in the last few months, and I've noticed that the performing arts, modern dance in particular, can deal with emotion in a way that's sincere and authentic – something the visual arts has struggled with for a long time now.

Neo-expressionism of the 1980s was the last large popular visual arts movement that sincerely (i.e., without the pretext of irony) dealt with emotion.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981, acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 81 x 69 inches (Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles).

But beginning around 2000, Neo-expressionism started to be regarded as overwrought and insincere; and it was felt the artists doing this type of work had lost their belief in it – their work had begun to be perceived as inauthentic. Ever since then emotion in art has been suspect, and the trend has been toward art that's intellectual, ironic, and impersonal. (Of course, there are many exceptions: Charles Garabedian, Matt Freedman and Brenda Goodman to name just three.)

But several choreographers are creating work that produces real emotions in the dancers and, via empathy with the dancers, the audience; and because the emotions in these dances are genuine, not acted or faked for the performance, they are necessarily credible and sincere.

To Being, choreographed by Jeanine Durning, was among the most intense and visceral dances I saw.

To Being, Jeanine Durning, choreographer, on the left, and Molly Poerstel and Julian Barnett in the back, September 9-26, The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, Queens, New York (photo credit: Alex Escalante). The Chocolate Factory’s website has a lot more photos.

For about an hour, the dancers – Durning, Molly Poerstel and Julian Barnett – busily moved around without stopping, without even slowing down. They just kept vigorously doing things – running, jumping, swinging their arms, moving things around, interweaving bodies, climbing walls and hanging from the rafters (literally!).

At first their movements seemed kind of jaunty as they scurried about, but the movements eventually came to seem compulsive and driven, then disturbing, and ultimately horrifying. After an hour or so in which they obsessively drove themselves, ignoring the audience (intensionally kept small) and treating each other as another object to move or wrap themselves around, they began to wear themselves out and slow down. At that point they interacted with each other in a gentler and more human way, and made verbal and eye contact with the audience. When I saw it, one of the dancers, Molly Poerstel, moved away from Julian Barnett's comforting embrace and quietly cried. It was as if they had to wear themselves out before they could slow down, make personal contact, and feel their feelings. 

The dance felt real in the way of sixties performance art and Happenings — something taking place in our real time and space. But this was more artful and emotionally intense than any Happening.    

I saw several other performances that used feats of endurance to generate real feelings in the performers. There's something about exhaustion that brings out real emotions.

Alessandro Sciarroni's dance Folk-S, will you still love me tomorrow? at New York Live Arts was a Schuhplattler, a Bavarian foot-stomping folk dance that would continue, as declared at the beginning, for as long as there was one audience member left, or one dancer. The first hour was frankly boring, but after that their exhaustion brought out the character of the individual dancers, their playfulness and creativity; and the audience (most stayed) laughed with them, and cheered them on.

Alessandro Sciarroni, FOLK-S will you still love me tomorrow?

August 11, 2013, Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna.

It reminded me of when Ragnar Kjartansson had the indie band The National perform the same 3½ minute song over and over for six hours with awesome focus at PS1. (I saw parts of the large screen video of the concert at Luhring Augustine's Bushwick gallery, and wrote about it here.) They are solid, professional musicians, who have played together for 15 years. They interacted with the audience and each other, and subtly varied the sad song which begins:

Sorrow found me when I was young
Sorrow waited, sorrow won
Sorrow they put me on the pill
It's in my honey, it's in my milk. 

Toward the end of the six hours, when fatigue was over-taking them, and with the audience cheering them on, Matt Berninger, the lead singer, quietly wept as he sang. 

Patricia Hoffbauer’s Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People at Gibney Dance was a dance about dance – the opposite of what I've been talking about – except for the reception at end. The reception was happy and festive as we drank wine and congratulated the dancers (many of whom were beloved older dancers), but every so often a gong would ring and the dancers would return to dancing in character. At that point we became aware that the dancers were real people performing their roles, doing their jobs, as it were – just as they had been doing the whole time before, when we hadn't yet grasped it.

The cast of Patricia Hoffbauer’s Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People taking a bow and breaking into a dance,  Gibney Dance, NY (photo credit: Scott Shaw/New York Times). 

It's significant that all these performances took place in small, intimate spaces. Grand spaces like the Koch Theater and the Met in Lincoln Center so remove you from the immediacy of the event that it feels to me like I'm watching it on TV.

Of course, no matter how "real" a work of art is, there are always conventions we consciously or unconsciously accept. Even with Durning's To Being, the dance takes place at a pre-arranged time and place, for a particular audience, and it's repeated for different audiences (although it changed each time). In addition, the dancers are skilled and highly conditioned, so their movements are necessarily more athletic and expressive than that of the average person, and of course, the dancers' actions serve no practical purpose.

Nevertheless, these dances were real enough to convince and captivate me, and it was refreshing and exhilarating to experience a work like To Being that could produce such strong feelings ... authentically.

To Being, Jeanine Durning, choreographer on the left and Molly Poerstel in the foreground, September 9-26, The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, Queens, New York.

Robert Ashley's opera "Perfect Lives"

By Charles Kessler

Yesterday I attended Robert Ashley's 1980s opera "Perfect Lives" – a day-long event that took place in seven different venues spread out all over Jersey City. It was presented by Con Vivo Music and Art House Productions, and enthusiastically performed by Varispeed. 

The opera was originally made as half-hour videos for television, but it was adapted and arranged by Verispeed for a live performance. As is typical of Ashley's operas, it was a rhythmically spoken-word score reminiscent of fifties beat poetry, with one or two narrators, a chorus occasionally interjecting, and the music more or less in the background. 

It was a thrilling occasion – a pleasure that got better and better as the day went on. Here are some photos:

11am, The Park (Bay Street at Newark Ave.).

1:30pm, The Bank (Provident Bank).

3pm, The Supermarket (Key Food).

5pm, The Church (St. Paul Lutheran).

7pm, The Back Yard (Harsimus Cemetery - Photo: Neil Glassman).

9pm, The Living Room (Barrow Mansion).

11pm, The Bar (Brightside Tavern).

Picasso Sculpture at MoMA

By Charles Kessler

Opening Reception of Picasso Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, NY. 

I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening reception of Picasso Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (through February 7, 2016). Lucky because I'm sure the show will be a lot more crowded once it's open to the public, and I met a lot of interesting people and had some great discussions.

I was blown away! By my count there are 159 sculptures in the show and only about twenty could be considered minor works, however delightful (engraved pebbles, small figurines, torn napkins, etc.). It seemed like a group exhibition of a dozen great sculptors. The guy was a monster – some kind of freak.

Here, chronologically, are photos of the sculptures I liked most (no one stopped me, so I guess it was okay) plus some of the more unusual ones (as if they all aren't). Unfortunately, the checklist does not contain the size of the works, so I'm approximating their height from memory.

Head of a Picador with a Broken Nose, 1903, bronze (Baltimore Museum of Art). About 9 inches high.

Figure, 1908, oak with painted accents (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 3 feet high. It seems right out of Gauguin. 

Apple, 1909, plaster (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 6 inches high.

Still Life, 1914, painted pine and poplar, nails, and upholstery fringe (Tate). About 12 inches high. 

Violin and Bottle on a Table, 1915, painted fir, string, nails, and charcoal (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 15 inches high. 

I love the back views of Picasso's sculptures. About half the time he ignored the back and half the time he made some attempt to do something with it. 

Back view of Violin and Bottle on a Table. 

Seated Woman, 1929, bronze (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 3 feet high. This is about as close to Matisse as Picasso gets in this exhibition. 

Then there are these two disturbing small reliefs that seem to have come out of nowhere:

On the left, Composition with Palm Leaf, 1930, cardboard, plants, nails and objects sewn and glued to back of canvas and stretcher and coated with sand; sand partially painted (Musée national Picasso, Paris); on the right, Composition with Glove, 1930, glove, cardboard, and plants sewn and glued to back of canvas and stretcher and coated with sand; sand partially painted (Musée national Picasso, Paris). Each about 10 inches high.

Bird, 1931-32, plaster (private collection). About 8 inches high. 

Crumpled Paper, 1934, plaster (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 6 inches high.

Woman with a Vase, 1933, bronze (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid). About 8 feet high. This reminds me of Jeff Koons for some reason.

The Orator, 1933-34, plaster, stone, and metal dowel (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). About 5 feet high.

This sculpture, more than most, needs to be seen close up to appreciate the textures.

Detail: The Orator, 1933-34. 

Death's Head, c.1941, bronze (private collection). About 9 inches high. 

Flowery Watering Can, 1951-52, plaster with watering can, metal parts, nails and wood (Musée national Picasso, Paris). About 3 feet high.

Again, this sculpture needs to be seen close up.

Detail: Flowery Watering Can, 1951-52.

Front and side view of Little Owl, 1951-52, painted bronze,  10 1/4  X  7 3/8  X  5 3/4 inches (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.). 

Two very large, strange bronze sculptures were in the last room.

On the left: Little Girl Jumping Rope, 1950-54, bronze (private collection). On the right: Woman with a Baby Carriage, 1950-54, bronze (Musée national Picasso, Paris).

And finally, a set of late, fairly flat and frontal wood sculptures all titled The Bathers and made in 1956:

Phew!

Charles Garabedian Update

Charles Garabedian in his studio, August 24, 2012.

At 91, Charles Garabedian remains one of the most vital living artists. I've known him since the 1970s and, as I wrote in a post about his 2011 retrospective: "He was one of the few people I ever met who could always keep me completely off balance. I could never predict what he was going to say, and it was usually something clever, deep and so many levels above anything I, a beginning artist still in my twenties, could conceive of." I should also add, he's one of the quickest and funniest people I've ever met. Every interview with him is at least interesting, including this new one the prolific and wide-ranging art blog Hyperallergic has just published. If it whets your appetite, you might want to check out this very extensive one conducted by Anne Ayres in 2003 for the Archives of American Art.

He'll be having an exhibition from October 8th- November 7th at the L. A. Louver Gallery in Venice California. And here are a few images from his recent exhibition at the Betty Cuningham Gallery. Note how big they are.

Sisyphus, 2007, Acrylic on paper, 35 1/4 x 44 1/4 inches.

Now She Can't Curse Us, 2014, acrylic on paper, 15 3/4 x 48 inches.

Outside the Gates, 2013, acrylic on paper, 57 x 138 inches.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

By Charles Kessler

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Self-Portrait as a Photographer, 1924, oil on canvas, 20 ½ x 30 ¼ inches (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In the 1920s Kuniyoshi supported himself photographing art. 

Tom Wolf, one of my oldest and best friends (he introduced my wife and me 47+ years ago), curated a major exhibition of the Japanese-American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (through August 30th) and wrote a definitive catalog essay about the work. It is a major exhibition, indeed — 66 paintings and drawings covering his entire career; and it's the first comprehensive exhibition of his work in the United States in more than sixty years. This show is a revelation – Kuniyoshi should be more well-known.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Fish Kite, 1950, oil on canvas, 30 x 49 2/5 inches (Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan).

I had prepared a tirade about New York provincialism because the exhibition, which opened more than three months ago, had been ignored except for one review in the Washington Post. But recently excellent reviews by Allison Meier in Hyperallergic and the consistently perceptive Roberta Smith in the New York Times have been published.

Few people know of Yasuo Kuniyoshi even though he was among the most popular American artists in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art included him in 19 American Artists (the second exhibition they ever did); in 1948 the Whitney Museum of American Art gave him a retrospective (their first for a living artist); and, in 1952, Kuniyoshi represented the United States at the Venice Biennale (along with Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, and Edward Hopper). In addition he was popular among his artist peers and was elected president of several artist organizations, including in 1946 when 400 artists, meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, elected him the first president of the newly-formed Artists Equity.

It’s ironic that at the peak of his fame as an artist, Kuniyoshi was discriminated against by the country he emigrated to when he was only sixteen years old. Now, when Japanese-Americans experience relatively little discrimination, and the United States and Japan are great allies, Kuniyoshi is widely popular in Japan, but is hardly known here.

He sought United States citizenship his entire life but he was continually rejected because of the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act's restrictions on Japanese immigration, and, shamefully, his wife had to give up her United States citizenship when they married. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was classified an “enemy alien” and his bank account was frozen, and he had to observe a curfew. This even though he left Japan because he hated their militarism, and, during the war, he worked with the Office of War Information creating posters about Japanese atrocities.

Left: Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Killer, or Chinese woman praying  (Study for War Poster), 1942, pencil on paper, 16 ⅘ x 13 7⁄10 inches (Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi-Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY); Right: Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Hanged (Study for War Poster), 1943, pencil on paper, 16 ⅗ x 13 7⁄10 inches (Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan, Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

Kuniyoshi's art was original, but not radically so; nor was his work particularly influential. Radical innovation and international influence didn't occur in the United States until the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. But the art of other American artist of that era (Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Joseph Stella, Elie Nadelman, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, and Ben Shahn, to name a few) wasn't any more original or influential, yet they remain well-known.

I think the time might be ripe for a revival. For many years now, art history has been going through a sweeping process of re-evaluating the canon of twentieth-century American art. There's been greater receptiveness to what Roberta Smith referred to as the "vitally mongrel nature of American modernism," and few artists of this era fit this new canon better than Kuniyoshi who drew from the Old Masters, Asian art, early European Modernism and American folk art.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Child Frightened by Water, 1924, oil on canvas, 30 ⅛ x 24 1⁄16 inches (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC).

Nevertheless, I’m concerned that Kuniyoshi will not be given his due. I'm worried that the Smithsonian, however prestigious, is the only venue for this show. This is a show that should have travelled – it would have been perfect for LACMA, or the Whitney. (The Whitney sadly seems to have given up showing earlier American art – I wonder what their art history-oriented curator Barbara Haskell is doing with her time now?)

I can't help feeling there would be more interest in Kuniyoshi if this show travelled to a major New York museum as it should have. The New York art world can be very provincial and insular at times, or perhaps I'm being provincial thinking a New York venue would make a difference. Here's a selection of work from the exhibition; judge for yourselves how deserving of a revival it is.

Early Work:
Like many American Modernist painters of this era, Kuniyoshi drew inspiration from American folk art.

Arnold Newman, Photo Portrait of the Japanese painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, September 6, 1941 in New York City  (watermark - Getty Images).  Kuniyoshi is surrounded by the folk art he collected in Ogunquit, Maine, a place where many of his fellow American Modernists spent their summers and hunted for folk art. 

His early work has the flat frontality, simple shapes, tilted up space and clunky proportions that American Modernists so loved about folk art. (Kuniyoshi's work is in the current exhibition Folk Art and American Modernism at the American Folk Art Museum in New York – through September 27th.) On first sight, the art of this period has the light, comical charm of folk art, but there's usually a disconcerting undercurrent to it.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Strong Woman with Child, 1925, oil on canvas, 57 ¼ x 44 ⅞ inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.50 Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi-Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, The Swimmer, 1924, oil on canvas, 20 ½ x 30 ½ inches (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Gift of Ferdinand Howald, Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

War Years:
As I described above, these years were especially difficult for Kuniyoshi. Even the surface charm of his early paintings is gone, replaced by tragic subjects such as the desolate landscape with starving dogs (below).

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Landscape with Two Dogs, 1945, oil on canvas, 10 ⅝ x 18 ½ inches (Fukutake Collection, Okayama, Japan, Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Mother and Daughter, 1945, oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 30 ¼ inches (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Patrons Art Fund, Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

Late work – post war:
Kuniyoshi must have been tormented after the war – pleased the war ended and democracy was saved, but horrified by the death and destruction, especially the horrors of the atomic bombs exploded over Japan. In addition, there was the rise of McCarthyism when conservative congressmen ridiculed his art and accused him of Communist sympathies. On top of it all, he was losing his popularity and his avant garde legitimacy to the Abstract Expressionists, and was sick from the cancer that eventually killed him. Perhaps because of all this, Kuniyoshi produced what I believe is his best, most expressive and intense art. And Kuniyoshi's artistic range during these years is astounding.

He made several dark, violent and despairing paintings like Festivities Ended, 1947 below (which I assume refers to the war, and to Picasso's Guernica – which he undoubtably saw at the Museum of Modern Art).

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Festivities Ended, 1947, oil on canvas, 39 3⁄10 x 69 ⅕ inches (Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi-Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

And he also made paintings that employed bright cheerful colors; but, like his earlier, ostensibly charming folk-like paintings, these works are superficially appealing but ultimately creepy, even horrifying.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Fakirs, 1951, oil on canvas, 50 ¼ in x 32 ¼ inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.93 Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi-Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

My favorite Kuniyoshi paintings, and I think his most original, are his late sumi ink paintings where he applied the ink very thick and scratched into it to create highlights. Compared with his earlier ink paintings from the 1920s, and compared with traditional Japanese art, this work is less decorative and a lot rougher, and has tremendous physical presence even though it's small and on paper. And the subject matter is horrifying.

Unfortunately, the power of these paintings can't be captured in reproduction – too bad the show didn't travel.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Work at Dawn, 1952, pen and ink and brush and ink on paper, 18 ½ x 28 ¼ inches (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Sara Mazo Kuniyoshi in honor of Lloyd Goodrich Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi-Licensed by VAGA, New York). This is difficult to see in reproduction, but it's an ant carrying a dead praying mantis. 

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Fish Head, 1952, ink and wash on paper, 22 x 28 inches (Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Old Tree, c. 1953, ink on paper, 28 ½ x 22 ⅝ inches (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Special Purchase Fund, 1953, Art © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).