Woman Reclining

Kuniyoshi Yasuo, who had been producing work brimming with imagination and humor in New York, visited Paris twice in the late 1920s. There, influenced by his old friend Jules Pascin, he changed direction, leaving the fantasy-laden style in which he had worked until then for an approach that addressed social realities. He also began to use models in his work. In the 1930s, he established his image of the "universal woman", indoors, and redolent of the melancholy of the city. This work was painted during his transition to that new style. A woman, in her underclothes, lies asleep amidst dominant brown tones. The painting is devoid of explanatory context, but one sense the loneliness of contemporary man, a loneliness anyone may share. This painting, which was shown in a solo exhibition in Japan when Kuniyoshi returned there briefly in 1931, was the first of his works to find a Japanese buyer.