Yasuo Kuniyoshi collection

Yasuo Kuniyoshi was born in Japan in 1889. In 1906, Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States and studied art in night school in Los Angeles. In 1910, he moved to New York.

Kuniyoshi studied with Kenneth Hayes Millar at the Art Students League from 1916-1920 and spent summers studying at Hamilton Easter Fields Ogunquit (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture from 1918-1922. During this time, he married Katherine Schmidt and also began as a commercial photographer.

In 1922, Kuniyoshi held his first one-man exhibition of painting at the Daniel Gallery, New York. Between 1925-1928, he traveled extensively to Europe. In 1929, he built an artist's colony in Woodstock, NY. A few years later, he divorced Katherine Schmidt, and shortly thereafter began teaching at the Art Students League, New York.

In 1935, Kuniyoshi married Sara Mazo. He continued to teach, set up a darkroom studio in Woodstock, and served on the National Executive Committee of the American Artists Congress. Kuniyoshi presented "What is American in American Art" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1940. A year later he has to surrender his camera to the United States government.

In 1942, there is a retrospective exhibition of his works for the benefit of the United China Relief at the Downtown Gallery, New York and he also designs war posters for the Office of War Information. In 1946, Kuniyoshi organized a Harvest Festival Dance at Woodstock to benefit Japanese in American relocation camps. From 1947-1951, he is the first President of Artists Equity, and in 1948, the recipient of the Whitney Museum's first one-man retrospective show of a living artist's work. Kuniyoshi died in 1953.