In 1973, a group of Indigenous artists formed a collective.The press called them the Indian Group of Seven.Their goal?To raise the profile of Indigenous art.
That was all or nothing.We're representing all our people.
And create a permanent space in galleries for Indigenous artists in Canada and around the world.
That was really a rock star moment for me.
I'm Soleil Lounière, and this is Among Equals, the history and legacy of the Professional Native Indian Artists, Inc.Listen wherever podcasts are heard.
Art Slice is a different dive into art history.We goof around, we curse, you learn from it, but don't expect a typical lecture.You're welcome.
Come on, let's get going before our streamers fall again.What are they called, these streamers here? Party streamers.Party streamers.Is this working now?Yeah, I think so.I think it's live, Stephanie.
I think we're going live.Yes, we are.Listeners, we're going to try something a little bit different today.Like and subscribe.Yes, like and subscribe for more of this.
So we're going to play this black and white video anime, arguably one of the first animes ever animated from 1943.So hang in there.We promise that this is all related and will make sense.And we're going in gold.
Jumping right in.Jump right in.Skin to skin.What the hell do we know?I keep reciting that song.
Which one?I don't know.It doesn't matter.Okay.We're jumping in.I care.Okay.
Yeah.So we got a little bit of a POV sort of George Clooney on the ship.Perfect Storm, if you remember that.Yes, I do actually.Black and white.And then we got some like charcoal looking clouds in the background.
They almost look like it's filmed, right?It almost looks like it's actually filmed.Yes, it does actually.But no, they're a little bit cartoony.
Now we have a giant naval battleship just cutting through these waves.
Cutting through the waves.So this is very much like Perfect Storm meets Disney meets William Pentridge, if you know his work.
Yes.I think the music's a lot better.Definitely got a heroic soundtrack that I would take.
Well, the naval ship is here to save us, Stephanie.Save us from what looks to be the Monstars, because there's a couple of Bugs this year.Oh.A couple of Bugs as bunnies.
Well, maybe.They're just silhouettes right now. They're wheeling out their missiles.Alright, so we have a Bugzzz at the top of this mast on said naval ship.The ears are just kind of flapping and giving directions.
That's an auditory nightmare right there.Just imagine if your ears did that.That's an aneurysm waiting to happen.Yeah, that's terrifying.Fix it in post so you can hear it.Okay, thank you.We'll give you a little taste of the aneurysm.
Okay, so we have like a ton of cute animals just falling into line, military line.We have monkeys, birds.Pheasants, I believe.Pheasants, yes.And dogs.Yeah, we got the target spot dog.
What a weird collection of animals.Ooh, a dog here hoisting a kanji flag.Little peach emoji.Yes, yes.He's looking for another ship.Maybe with an eggplant emoji or another peach emoji.No judgment.
or a peach, an eggplant, a kiwi, all just kinda grouped in together.It's a group of fruits.It's a group of fruits.Just a group of fruits.Group of foods, fruits, kay.Just Caligula's fruits.
I don't think there's a flag big enough to fit all of those on there. So the foreground, background, all of the angles, the depth and perspectives, it's all just giving like really amazing cinematography.
There's a lot more volume than you'd expect to see in like a flat cartoon.You know, the way that kind of like bulbous cartoon bodies move through space, it almost feels like it's rotoscoped or it almost feels like Pixar.Yes.
You know, like at times there's like a third dimensionality to it.I'm not sure how they're doing it.Yeah.
They're also getting really creative with the parallax synchrony, like they're moving towards different vanishing points in a way, and those points are off-kilter.
Yes, that explains a lot.
We have a human.Yes, we have a human, man, boy, boy-man.Boy-man, yeah.Boy-man.Yes, definitely not George Clooney.
Different bangs, different bangs.
Different do, very jarring.All of this is jarring.
It's creepy.It's creepy.Everyone else is an animal.Yes.He seems to be ordering them around.It's got very Animal Crossing vibes.Giving Animal Crossing.
Dog's very mad.Spot the dog from the target ads or is mad.He's pointing at the island, circling it.
So this boy man, boy man, boy man, excuse me, boy man, Momotaro, he is a famous folk legend, and he is being reinvented right before our Ohos listeners from his humble beginnings from 14th century Okayama.Okay, okay, okay.
So the original folktale did not include a lot of this, right?It did not include a Japanese naval warship.No, it was a tiny boat.It definitely didn't include an animal infantry, but more of a squad.
What about animals running into each other when their general is coming?
Probably.The dog, the monkey, and the pheasant were all there, so part of the squad.
Yeah, it was one monkey, one dog, one bird, one boy-man squad.Situation, yes, definitely.Was there some butt-scratching in the original folktale?
I don't think so.So we're heaping all of this praise onto this film, and it's merited, but it's really unfortunate because of all of the imperial Japanese headbands on all of these cute ass animals.
Well, I mean, it's the cozy core battleship that a fascist could only dream of, right?Yeah.And this monkey is teasing the dog, spot the dog, because he can't keep his Japanese imperial headband up.On account of the floppy ears.
Yeah, on his floppy ears.You gotta have that sturdy, like, you know, bipedal cartilage. Right?If you want an imperial headband and or orbital piercing.Right.
Okay.Monkey's going to show us.Monkey see, monkey do. So there have been different iterations of the Momotaro tale throughout the centuries, right?
But the basics are that Momotaro was born of a mysteriously found peach to a childless elderly couple, and his name translates to Elder Peach Sun.Peach Elder Sun, sure.Something like that.When this boy-man grows up into an elder young-man, young man.
He lets his family know that he's leaving to fight the ogres that live on a distant island, who have enslaved locals from his village.
Right.Hey, that's why he's punching the map, right?
Map punching.Map puncher.So his family is rightfully worried, but they believe in his cause.So they pack him up some nourishing rice dumplings to go.Okay.Give him a little pat on the peach.
Send him on his way.Send him on his journey.Send him on his hero's journey.
Right, right.I love that.On the journey there, Momotaro collects a squad, right?The dog, the monkey, and the bird.
So, like, the infantry in this film.
He bribes, he berates, he talks them into it.
I'm not even joking, that's how it happens.
There's a lot of issues with interpersonal relationships.They don't always get along.You just have cartilage now, bitch.That's right.
But the story becomes about setting aside their personal differences and working towards a common goal.
In this case, rescuing the fellow villagers from the ogres.It's a good story.It has a moral compass.But as you can see here, who is considered the ogres? bit malleable, maybe a little bit more malleable.
A couple of decades before this, the artists that we're covering today would have been taught this local folktale at school, as it was a perfect analogy for kids to learn about the Meiji Restoration, which is when the country's motto became, quote, enrich the state, strengthen the military.
We're seeing a lot of military here, seeing a lot of kiddos here.Right.
So we'll get into the why of this later, but Momotoro, among other, like many other things, had become a military recruitment tool, which was needed to keep enriching that state.So, you know, stardom young.Teach the kiddos.
It's not like we do that with cartoons, Stephanie.
Learn the kiddos with fun cartoons. I'm Stephanie Duenas.Russell Shoemaker.Welcome to Art Slice, where today we will be covering, not the director of this beautiful film, Mitsuyo Seyo, who actually has an amazing story in his own right.
Right. But instead we're covering the criminally underrated painter, printmaker, and photographer Yasuo Kuniyoshi, whose work evolved from Japanese and American folk art-inspired slices of life to haunting, day-glow dystopian carnivals.
Which were also slices of life.
It's like a new kind of whoreful, whoreful?
Whoreful life. Horrible.We had to create its own new word.Es complicado.Which is why we are so late with this episode.Mucho lato.We're happy.We're happy to be back.Yas's early life in Japan isn't that well documented.
And yes, we will be referring to Yasuo as Yas.Okay, Yas. So what we do know about Yas's early life is that he was an only child.He was born in 1889.His father was a working class union leader.
And since he grew up in Okayama, which is known for its craft products, he attended an industrial textile school, which was his first experience with making.
We know growing into his young adulthood that Japan was slowly veering far, far, far right, and his own political beliefs were headed in the opposite direction.
Service was compulsory for a military that, by and large, had started to act as aggressors for resources and control.The most recent, a conflict with Russia over China's land with, I think, like 86,000 Japanese casualties alone.
So not exactly the Animal Crossing cozy court battleship we see here today. A little bit more violent, a little more blood.
Some of those dogs are having doggy funerals.You know what I mean?
All right.This got very sad very quick.Okay.
So little pheasant caskets, doggy casket, monkey casket.
It's like a graveyard of dogs.
Okay.Okay.At the age of 16 in 1905, Yasuo was like, I got to get the hell out of here.Okay.I must set sail.I must set sail to the land of the free.Okay.So hesitant.Right.
Say baby.Okay. Purple Mountain's majesty baby.
Right.So hesitant, but hopeful, his parents gave their little Momotaro their blessings.Instead of dumplings, they gave him their savings of $200, which was a lot at that time, though.
And Yasuo, in turn, promises to learn English, become a translator, and come back to the family when all of this has blown over.
Yass was fortunate to follow the desire line set by hundreds of thousands of Japanese migrants, or Nikkei, who traveled to Hawaii and other Pacific coastal cities decades before him.
And while initially welcome for their low cost labor, when many decided to stay, growing roots in American soil, partaking in that American dream, becoming Methodists, sending their children to public schools, becoming Hoosiers.What?
Never mind, go on. They also started buying houses, opening up banks and restaurants.
Going to malt shops, Steph.Sipping on some malt sodas.I'm not sure what those are.With the pebble ice, right?The little pebble ice, the crunch pebble ice.Sounds right.You got the little tiny hat like the In-N-Out people still do, right?
Fish fries, going to fish fries, you know?
Doing the 24-hour dance-a-thon marathon like in the Weezer music videos. I don't know what that is, but dance till you die.
White American citizens saw non-whites growing that generation of wealth, and thus they grew concerned because that was their land.
And they're daying a 24 hour dance-a-thon, marathon, Weezer-a-thon, fish fry-a-thon, a-thon, right?My people had to watch the dang throne, Stephanie.
The wide, plush, reclining, lazy boy, plush, dual cup holder throne with the little lever that goes back like that.
You know?Put your legs up.
Right in the air, right in the air.Into the space, just like the white people were the first people into space, colonizing space.Okay.
Speaking of colonizing, Uncle Sam laid down some laws, okay, to protect, to protect El Trono Flojo.
Yeah, I am my El Trono Flono, okay?How do you say why in Spanish? Ancho.
Two aguas.I don't know how to say the other ones.Coke and aguas.
Dos aguas.Coke agua.Coke agua.Okay.How do you say plush?
I don't know that one.Okay.Yes, do this.
Do this.Plush.No, that's me talking to a non-white person.That's how I talk to non-white people.Okay.Plush.I want plush.Uno, dos.Oh my God, stop.Coca. Agua.Okay.Pebble ice.
Settle down.Frio.Settle down in your- Pebble frio.Settle down in your trono, please. All right, so back to colonizing Uncle Sam.Back to those laws.So first of all, if a man married a non-U.S.citizen, and by non-U.S.
citizen, what they really meant was Asian, that was fine, that was okay, totally cool.However, if a woman married a non-U.S.citizen, i.e.Asian, her U.S.citizenship would be revoked.
Okay, it's because only men can contract yellow fever, Stephanie.Okay, this is just science.Did you listen to the Weezer album Pinkerton?
All of that was followed by a polite gentleman's agreement between Japan and the US of A that agreed no more Japanese migrants.
America wanted to stay white and Japan concerned with enriching the state and strengthening that military, anymore, you know, target the spot dogs to invade China or whatever, actually agreed.Less brain drain and military drain, arigato.
So this handshake, not an actual handshake, more of an agreement.Yeah, exactly. happened just a year after Yasuo had boarded a ship to cross the Pacific.A Weezer cruise ship.
Yas would first arrive in Vancouver, British Columbia, then head to Spokane, Washington, staying in a Nikkei-owned hotel where Nikkei Connections led him to temporary work so that he could, you know, save and get back to the plan, which was to learn the culture, you know, finish high school and basically move on with his life.
Right, right.He was 16 years old, right?You have to think he is pretty overwhelmed at this point, pretty emo at this point.And he's going into these places where he's going to be exploited by low-paying jobs.
I think he worked at a railroad construction firm for a little bit, and he saw his fellow immigrants sleep on straw, or if they were lucky, in tents on straw.
So this is where Yasuo's image of America, all those stories he heard, faced the reality of America, right?But it was still preferable to dying in a war.
Yes.My dad actually also immigrated from Mexico and he just recently told me how it was not at all what he expected, like actually being here in the U.S.
Definitely not what he had heard back home, but he was kind of stuck here and so he couldn't go back and he had to work odd jobs and he had to rely on sketchy people because he had no one to support him.
Yeah, it's not all fireworks and Lake Salada burgers.
American flies.I mean, there are American flies.It is.Anyway, it was not what he thought.And I'm sure this happens to a lot of people.So shitty job after shitty job.
Yeah, slowly but surely made his way further south to Los Angeles, where he took on odd jobs while finally enrolling in high school.
Yass had never considered making art a career, but he must have learned enough back in that industrial textile school in Okuyama, because when one of his teachers observed him drawing from afar, they were amazed.
They were like, you gotta go into art, like now, go, leave the school, go to the other school, you're also a little bit too old to be in this high school.
Anyway, so he enrolled in courses at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design, where he would study until he was 21. all the while losing sight of that wonderful career in translation, the Momotoro plan, Peach Boy plan, the Peach plan.
But, but, to... However, to further this art path, he's going to have to make yet another major move, this time across vast rolling hills, not waves, towards New York City.
New York City. When Yas arrived in Los Angeles, there was a huge Japanese community established there.And there was security in that because, you know, power in numbers, power in shared experiences.
But that whole Nikkei wave dwindled as it moved eastward.And New York City.New York City.New York City was set to only have disparate micro communities at this time.Fortunately, his father was able to connect him with a fellow Japanese artist.
But other than that, he was pretty much on his own.
There was this whole alternative timeline, parallel universe thing that could have happened had Yasuo not found himself taking classes at the Arts Student League in 1916, more than he could have ever known when he first set foot in the building, right?
First of all, this was a school that Georgie O'Keefe, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, to name just a few, had attended. So his work was going to be challenged by other incredible artists and teachers.
He also studied the hot alpha boys of art history, right?Like the Greco, leaving his pits where they may fall.Renoir, Cezanne, and one of my all-time favorites, Albert Pinkham Ryder, if you remember back to our black episode.Yes.
It was next to free to attend.He could just focus on thinking and working in different ways, which is this critical tool for growth. Space was made for exploration and failure was encouraged.So he dug in.He started making prints.He started painting.
He started taking photographs.Yeah.We seriously need more schools like this, like right now, like yesterday, actually, because often what is available can sometimes be exorbitant, insular and gatekeeping.
Yeah.I mean, just imagine maybe you have no intention of ever taking art seriously, but you get to take a class and a young Georgia O'Keeffe is right next to you, you know, before she was like doing Santa Fe Vogue or whatever.
And you get to see just even for like a class or two, the formative years of an artist.You're not just seeing this like finished showroom product.You get to see the factory, you get to see the struggle, you get to see all the times they fuck up.
And you also get to see them come back with that commitment and vision to bring out what it is they're searching for.
And this is something like you get to keep, I mean, maybe you're just like gonna be a scientist or like a, I don't know, a retail person, but you get to keep that finite moment in your life.
You get to stick that in your pocket and keep it for later and pull it out when you wanna look at it, you know?
Yeah, you definitely get an appreciation for art you may have not gotten otherwise.
So beyond just immersing himself in all of these different ways of working, Yas was able to find missing parts of his life, like his friends, mentors, his first wife who, yes, yes, would give up her citizenship to marry him.
You can actually spot a little Yasuo soaking up some drunken fireman chaos in one of Alexander Calder's early paintings.
Whoa, I never noticed this before.This is crazy.
I know, it's right there.And in Peggy Bacon's etching of artists at a bowling alley.
He's very, yeah, his little head is thrown back, he's smoking on a peep.Yeah.And honestly, in almost every photo of him at this time, he's just having so much fun.He's loving life. life.He's having so much fun.
He still struggled financially, mentally, and with all of those prejudices, but he'd gone from being this only child, all by himself, on his way to a totally foreign land, to fully realizing how lucky it was to have found a type of family who could offer him, quote, the warmth and kindness which I sorely needed, end quote.
From 1920 to 1924, Kuniyoshi would find himself spending his summers away from the swampy New York City.
New York City.Air conditioner-less brownstones in fisherman shacks turned artist studios off of a quiet seaside cove in the small town of Agunquit, Maine.
Between rural forests and craggy oceans, Agunquit had slowly been building itself as a vacation hotspot for sweaty Bostonians and New Yorkers alike.
building an electric trolley that would pass by a hodgepodge of lobster boils, cafes with pressed-tin ceilings, weathered clapboard homes, massive beau-colonial hotels, and even a pagoda-inspired tea room where its Italian owner served Chinese punch.
Okay, okay.Punch.Me gusta.Okay.
Okay.Ciao. These attractions couldn't escape the industrial reminders that Maine survived on farming, fishing and lumber the other nine months of the year.Lumberjacking, yeah.Right.Jacking it up.OK.
Well down jacking it down down yeah down new word making the landscapes seem idyllic and disjointed at the same time The original draw of a gun quit was its reputation of having a lively arts community There were playhouses and two summer artists colonies one of which was funded and operated by Hamilton Easterfield where kuniyoshi and his wife Catherine were regulars not as culty as it sounds yeah
They would spend their days lounging near the ocean, taking photographs, collecting at least one truckload of thrifted objects and folk art, which would make later cameos in their work.
And of course, there was sketching and painting with the other artists in the colony.
Hamilton Easterfield, I always want to say Hamilton Hamsterfield or something like that, was an artist, an art collector, an educator, a critic, and wealthy enough to support these artists.
He didn't have like the Peggy G, Peggy Guggenheim levels of wealth, but his impact was low-key Peggy G, right?He had bat sunglasses probably, I assume everybody did from that era.It's Peggy's look.
Maybe he had a little, maybe a little sack of perritos.Perritos?Yeah, perritos.He could have been a sex pest.We don't know.We don't know.Hell yeah! We don't know, we haven't read the literature.
But what we do know is that he created these progressive art schools, artist housing, gallery spaces, and he introduced American capital A artists to American under case folk art.No, not right now.
Not, yeah, just simmer down.
We'll be with you in a minute.Strongly believing that there was untapped potential in the sincerity and rawness of folk art.
You can see that folk influence on artists in Hamilton's circle like Marsden Hartley, George Bellows, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Where modern art can be a little too aware, a little highfalutin, Stephanie, folk art was unembarrassed.It wasn't self-conscious.It didn't come from a particular school.It happened intuitively, regionally.
When you think of folk art you might think of colorful, crocheted dolls which eyes follow you, stitched by a clairvoyant mama, and sold alongside a peapod's special moonshine near the train station.
before it was shuttered on account of the government selling it off to a company, probably a private entity, but still funding it partially at least.
And while you should never, ever, under any circumstances, buy one of those dolls, let alone take it home with you, they could maybe be considered folk art.
Folk art is a very broad term, broader than what we're foolishly trying to summarize here, so let's just get some parameters straight.It's definitely art that exists outside of ordained art institutions.
But that doesn't mean it's not taught or passed down from person to person.It emerges from a region or a community.It can be made collectively or by a singular artist, like Mima, and is not confined to the craft versus art delineation.
It can be one, it can be the other, it can be both. Which means it can be utilitarian, like a hand-welded weather vane, or a hand-stretched Japanese Mingei toy drum.Mingei means art of the people, so folk art.
Or it can be singular works of art, like those by Elijah Pierce who carved and painted reliefs of his spiritual beliefs.
So it's not a singular thing or style, but importantly, it's not machine mass produced and it reflects cultural aspects of a community or an individual within that community.
My young art brain was exploded when I stumbled into an Amish quilt exhibition at the D. Young Museum many, many, many years ago.And I think there's some of the best examples of all of those disparate folk art elements coming together.
Amish quilts are functional, they keep you warm in those long Pennsylvania winters.
Yet there they were, hung up on the museum walls like paintings, with geometric patterns so wild and so unpredictable that they would easily hang next to a Ron Davis abstraction.Stephanie her little pantry mods have been satiated, kind of.
Their stomach enzymes are going to be chewing on that for a while.And listeners, you might be thinking this description of folk art sounds just like art, right?
And you're not wrong, but we still define them very differently because basically the wealthy defined them and valued them very differently.But I think back to Yasuo, He understood that it was deeper than just aping the look of folk art, right?
He grew up with those Japanese crafts, the toys, lanterns, fans, nesting boxes, that sort of thing.And they all kind of had this like tactile quality to them.And materials themselves tell a story.
He also studied at that textile industrial high school because Okuyama was where many of those objects were made.But going back even further was that connection to Japanese folklore, which were the products of those Shintoist beliefs.
So story after story of spirits existing in everything, like good, bad, chaotic, neutral, whatever, like existing in everything, right? You can see it in the story of Momotoro, too.The dog, the monkey, the pheasant, these are deities in Shinto.
Dogs, lion dogs, are guardians of Shinto shrines, and even the dumplings that were given to them, they had like a ritualistic purpose to them, as like a little snack, a little Taiju until later snack for proto-deities.
Get a little grumble in your proto-deity tummy.A little curry dumpling ought to solve that.Dumpling for you, dumpling for you.
I think he started seeing like all the hodgepodge elements of Maine that we were mentioning, like the shifting weather, the weird architecture, the constant reminders of the industry that kept Maine afloat as a kind of Shintoism, like these vehicles for deeper meanings, right?
Right, right.And we can attest to this because we lived like an hour and a half-ish from coastal Maine, so we were there a lot.And absolutely, there's just this like vibe there.
Even with the modernization, the historic buildings that are there, they have this presence of nature.It just feels very handmade.It feels very crafty, for lack of a better term.It feels very alive.
Every object has a personality, which could be a spirit.
Yasuo said of his time in Maine that the, quote, severe landscape and simple New England buildings were my god and home. So, listeners, we're about to get to Kuniyoshi's paintings from this time period.
But as we were writing this episode, there was just like this this wall that made us work really hard to talk about.Exactly.Exactly. Yeah, but okay.
Much of his work from the 20s and early 30s are, on the surface, your run-of-the-mill coastal or farmscapes that prominently feature figures and various things, objects, like animals, shells, fruit, and flora, scattered in these collage-like arrangements.
But they're off, right?They're kind of strange, like something's off, like the Scrivene Chapel, right?It's like giving It's getting scrunched, low relief, and diorama.But he doesn't have that medievalness to blame it on.
So normal-ish but uncanny valley, right?The proportions, the perspectives can flip, they can shrink.Each work follows a realistic perspective to a point until it decides not to.A river will turn 90 degrees straight upwards.
A head or an arm will bloat to the shape of an eggplant or an awkward-looking geode.Gravity, volume, form, everything just everything just kind of fluctuates at will.
He's only really using a range of earth tones, all very muted, like yellow ochre, burnt sienna, ivory black, viridian.
Viridian, yeah, yeah, yeah.Like those mid-gate pieces where the artist might have painted on raw wood, there's sort of this buffering happening to the vibrancy of the paint, right, because the wood is soaking it up. It's thirsty.
It's thirsty water, right?But he's finding that effect on canvas.Even in the brightest moments of his paintings, there's not like very much contrast to speak of.So it kind of casts this like melancholic haze to every farmscape, every portrait.
Also, the longer you look, the more you spot all of these little vignetted details like snakes, floating children, lightning, unkind oceans, which all adds anxiety to the melancholy.
It's in the way he tells the story too, like when he breaks with his version of realism, it's for this like flat, simple narration.So the snake that you mentioned is probably integral to whatever tale he's weaving, he's webbing, right?
It's out there just in the open, kind of stamped on like a symbol.Very Birchfield.A little bit Birchfield, yeah. Snake is here, child is running from that snake in very simplistic forms, otherwise mixed into, you know, a normal painting.
And that's like that coded symbol within a painting.There's layers.
In almost all of the research of his work, a few of these details might be mentioned, but then it snaps right back to the general story of his life, which really skirts the wonderful weirdness of the work itself.
And it doesn't really answer the real question, right?Like what kind of looking and thinking led to making
Yeah, and like, we're artists.This is why we made Art Slice, right?We want the sauce.We want the sauce of these artists.We gotta know their sauce.
La salsa.Queremos la salsa.
I don't think I really understood Yas's salsa until I spent time with his drawings, which are like, they're criminally overlooked, first of all, and in my opinion, pack way more tension and way more oomph than his paintings do.
Especially, I mean, they do and they don't, right?It's like, it's kind of like the key to unlocking them. One of the earliest is Bad Dream from 1924.It's black and white.
It has these Sumi ink level dark saturated moments next to these white wide open spaces, so it doesn't really get muddy, right?Volume defines the aforementioned lumpy forms, those geode lumpy forms, right?
And it's kind of carved out with the broad side of a piece of charcoal next to these spider web thin lines of intricate details.I fucking love it.Fucking love it, Stephanie.
Beautiful, yeah, it's amazing.
It's been a while since we did one of these stuff.
Yes.Yes, it has.Very good.
Okay, I'm gonna play the music now.
Very nice.You ready for this?Okay.
Yeah, let's do it.The thematic music.
The thematic music, yes.An unexpected summer storm rolls in before you feel the plummeting barometric pressure and notice the quieting of the normally lively birds.
Like frames missing from a movie, the clouds accumulate quickly in lags and skip over the clear and sunny sky, followed by monotonous drumming, both violent and restrained, floating closer and closer.
Raijin, a thunder god with a demonic Oni smile, emerges from the clouds, striking his drums to make lightning part the darkness, which turns the peaceful prairie below into a deleted scene from Eraserhead.
Tree branches become snakes, fish sprout wings, and ride the rain upstream.Hybrid-winged yokai swoop in, stealing away crops and bathing women.And, uh, no? A bovine horse creature.Half bovine, half horse.Both front halves.
Except the udders stayed under the chest.Like humans, I guess.Also, the horse half has like a tree unicorn horn.Very cat dog, if you remember cat dogs.
Two surmise, a very cat dog, cow horse creature with udders on the chest area and the tree unicorn horn.Rears up, pushing a wind demon off a clip.A lone bathing woman, a nod to Amaterasu, the sun goddess, holds an apotropaic rooster.
The rooster and her go way back.
Okay.Yeah. Branch and beak, which despite all of this chaos, is sprouting new leaves and rays of sun beginning to part the clouds.
So this bad dream, it's the most obvious combination of Japanese folklore with those severe god-like main farmscapes that would be the backdrop to his work from this time.
But he's pulling from his homeland, right?
Like there are echoes of Kano or even Ukiyo-e's use of spatial relationships, the negative versus the highly defined, that dictate the flow of the composition, kind of keeps you weaving in and out of the composition, right?
But he's using it very differently, like it's more complicated, it's way less decorative.It kind of has that parallax synchrony that we saw in the Momotaro film, right?
And honestly, the same synchrony that those Cano paintings can have, but like you said, the flow that's there, all that rhythm and flow that's in his drawings, instead of being a sort of harmonious one, it's a nervous one.It's an anxious one.
And I think that's the answer we were searching for on how he's able to basically mix in that coded language, that symbolistic, linear storytelling with the painterly.
Now, if we compare Bad Dream to the paintings he was creating around this time, for example, Little Joe with Cow from 1923, there's still plenty of Kano and Ukiyo-e in there, okay?There's just some added modernist and folk art influence.
Yeah, same variables, same reference points.It's essentially the same visual language as the drawings, including those moments of broad brushstrokes and microfine detail, right?
This is why Yas's paintings are so wonderfully unnerving.There isn't a single scooper upper yokai flying towards you, but that tension, that anxiety, is still there, scooper.And importantly, there's still mysterious folklore-like characters.
Instead of Raijin, Amaterasu, or even Adam and Eve, we have characters like rebellious fruit-obsessed Baby, or... He's a fruit bully.
He's a bully for fruit.Go on, I'm sorry.A baby bully.
Or we have women who likes to roll around next to sharp branches and shells in the nude.
Yeah, like we do.Little Joey here, Little Joey, Noodle Fingers and Cow is an OC, he's an original character by Kuniyoshi, original folklore character, O-L-F-C-O, O-F-L-C, I have too many acronyms here.
Little Joey's little arm with the noodly fingers is either resting on or kind of guarding this triangular oblong bovine pal, right, with a little cute, Tuft of hair on his forehead.You kinda miss it in the pictures.
You gotta see this one in person, folks.And no equine backside this time, okay?No weird chest udders.Chudders.Yeah, no chudders.Wow.It feels like he is protecting... Chudders, wow.Okay.It feels like he is protecting his cow friend.
Is it from like a hungry yokai or a hungry manor, right?Right.You know?Right.I feel like there's a story being told there.Yes, absolutely.Maybe that wasn't the best one.You know, it's not one of Stephen King's best.
You know, you know what?That's really good, because speaking of Stephen King, there is still this creeping feeling, OK, that something is off, but it's not like a full on attack, like in a bad dream.
Some have suggested this is a loose reference to many Japanese folktales of children carrying out livestock duties to varying degrees of success.
It's not really clear here.It's not clear. No.But even if you knew none of that, you would sense something deeper here, right?It looks allegorical.It looks Stephen King-esque.Right.It gives Stephen King, right?Yeah.Well, it gives allegory.
I want to be clear, it's not very Stephen King-esque.
No SK that I know of. Yasuo, his life could have been a character in a folktale up to this point, right?
Right, he did the momotaro, he grabbed his little bindle sack, he said goodbye to his parents, and- Little peach boy butt moving, you know?
Bouncing in the- Bouncing up the-
Okay, so yeah, so he did the Momotaro, he grabbed his little bindle sack, and he said goodbye to his parents, and he traveled to a distant land at a very young age.They're just watching his peach butt bounce as he walks away.
That's the last thing they see down the horizon. He's still with us, shout out.Okay, so he's collecting his own companions as he goes along, right?So he's traveled from Okayama to Spokane to LA to New York to Maine.
These are all very distinct landscapes and cultures and within those places and times.So he's had to live very different lives in each of them.And he's slowly building this understanding of who he was in all of this.
His work would never lose that storied or allegorical look, and he even continued to reference folklore over the years.But his emotions and his experiences would start to override any literal translation from here on out.
Yass was 36 years old when he started this body of work.We've said this before and we'll say it again.
You are never too old.Never.Never.You're never too young.Sometimes you're too young.
We mention this because Yass had moved to America when he was very young and more of his life had been spent there than in Japan.
Those early years though, Stephanie, they're kind of like the childhood years, you know what I'm talking about?They don't really count, okay?Because when you're a child, you're really just like some sort of adult human husk.Like a tamale?Sure.
Like you're a husk for a full-sized human.Okay.You're swaying in the wind, you're growing slowly.Okay.You're absorbing everything in the atmosphere, like trauma.Oh, okay.Microplastics.Pollution. free radicals, dog pee.
And then you just emerge one day, a fully fledged human, right?That's what I experienced.What I'm trying to say is, this is a coming of a husk tale, right?
Yass was a husk on a boat, on the railroads, and then he kind of started over, he kind of emerged from that husk when he first of all came to America, came to America. Second of all, became an artist.
They're both huge changes, they're both whole identity changes.It's not like the old identity goes away, like the genealogy is still in there somewhere.But I think you start to associate more with the post-husk version than the pre-husk version.
Your history is in the husk.
Your history is in the husk, your future is huskless. You know what, you wake up every morning and you look at yourself in the mirror and you say, this is a huskless morning.I'm huskless from here on out.I shed my husk.Proudly.Let go of your husk.
Yeah.Okay.I wish I still had the husk around me a little bit sometimes.At least like a coat situation.Like a little open husk.Little cape.Yes.Little open husk situation.Okay.Husk vest. Performance husk.
Okay.Okay.So while we could absolutely say Yasuo was becoming a very... Just as cornucopia.
Okay.We all need them.You heard it here first.Coming soon. While we can absolutely say Yasuo was becoming a very successful artist, that doesn't mean what it means today.There just wasn't the infrastructure for professional artists, right?
The Guggenheim wasn't built yet.The Whitney hadn't yet rented a gallery space.
Yeah, Peggy G wasn't, like, scrounging around, looking for assets. Okay, we were centuries removed from royal court painters like Goya and several decades away from royal assholes like the YBAs, like Damien Hirst.
A successful artist meant that you were living this life that was personally rewarding, but monetarily, not so much.
So when letters gradually started coming in from his father, wondering when he was planning on returning home with that exciting career and translation that he had mentioned.During his house code, yes.
His early Huskies.His formative Huskies.Literally, he's forming a Husky.He's a Husky boy.Hey, I had to wear Huskies.
It was a husky kid.So his dad is writing, you know, how's that career?But also, please, please, please visit.Please visit.OK.And, you know, it's kind of bad here right now.Please visit.Kuniyoshi did what was right for him.Right.
He followed him as in Kuniyoshi, not him as in his father, not his father, Kuniyoshi.
Kuniyoshi.So he followed his truth and he did not return home.Yas loved his family, his homeland, but by this point in his life, he had changed.He was a husk no more.He fully considered himself an artist.
And even though the USA did not recognize it, he fully considered himself an American citizen.
It meant more than we could ever fully know to Yasuo when in 1930, he was selected for his first major group exhibition curated by, and longtime listeners will know, Alfred H. Barr, the title being 19 Living Americans, which placed him with some of the most important artists of the day, like Charles Birchfield, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper, to name a few.
The plaques and catalog read Yasuo Kuniyoshi, American, born in Japan, which is remarkable because he was legally not allowed to be an American.And of the paintings selected, one was a self-portrait of Yasuo dressed as a golf player from 1927.
And you're thinking, listener, so what?Yas liked to golf.Fine.Didn't expect it.Who cares?But it's fine.But at the time it was made, this would have been considered very controversial.
Yas is standing club in hand, proudly wearing the golfing gear of the day, right?Performance polos and a vanted khaki tech?No, no, no, no, no, no.Jodhpurs and sweater vests, right?Classic look.Classic look.Hard to pull off today.
You look kind of like an asshole if you try to pull it off today. I'm not gonna lie, unless you're going to some convention or something.
Anyway, with that same swirling, vague, earth-toned backdrop that he was using in his main works, that same muddy color that he was using in his main works.
Right, right, so why?Why is this so controversial?Yes, see.Basically, if you weren't white, you were not getting into any country clubs, then you say, oh, well, what about the municipal public golf courses?
Exactly, that's exactly what I was about to say.
The ones that my tax dollars pay for.
The club I'm part of.No.Stars and Stripes Clubs.
Bald Eagle, soaring through the Purple Mountains Club.Too bad, so sad.
You gotta be white.You gotta be white.
Okay, good thing.Well, that's good for me, not good for Yasuo.
Correct.Yeah, yeah.So, he's painting himself standing proudly in a place where white affluent Americans belong.
Yeah, this is the great 24-hour dance-a-thon, marathon, wheezer-a-thon, replacement theory, right?Right.I warned you about it in my article.
Yes, you did.I'm going to take a swing, Stephanie, and suggest these critics are maybe going to those country clubs.They're eating the cucumber sandwiches, and this is ruffling their cucumber sandwiches.And feathers.
The cucumber sandwich is probably made by immigrants, right?Yeah.That they don't want to pay or don't want them to have their citizenship. Anyway, so he's using also that American folk art style as well.He's painting Maine.
These are signifiers for Americana, right?The white gringo identity, okay.And he's showing how fuzzy those edges are becoming slowly, and that's scaring these critics.
fascism was creeping into America, it was creeping into Spain, it was certainly creeping into Germany, and even Japan.So there was this global paranoia where everyone was just like watching each other's lazy boy throne.
Just like lazy boys like looking at one another, just like their hand just like hovering over the lever to go back.But once somebody else goes back, it's like everyone else is gonna, it's like a lazy boy standoff.Standoff, lean back off.
I don't know if my analogy is clear here.There's a lot of analogies I'm working with. You know, it's kind of a global paranoia like they're like in that movie, but okay scary Clint Eastwood.
We got a Western coming on my toes Okay, well lazy boys like this wouldn't they're not it's you know, the lazy boy in a poncho the boy with the cowboy hat Maybe it wasn't as obvious, but like in Bad Dream, the barometric pressure was dropping.
In Yas's everyday, there might have been signs, ever so subtle, that if he took a beat and slowed down, something was off.
Maybe it was a prolonged stare on the subway, a conversation suddenly hushed in the bodega as he walked by, or the city streets on the way home feeling more cramped and narrower than usual.
As he processed what that was all about, he made his way to his doorstep where he was met with another letter from his hometown, this time turned urgent.
25 years later, Yas would find himself again floating somewhere between American and Japanese soil.
We don't know what he was feeling, what he was thinking, but you have to imagine his thoughts were also floating, lapping the side of the giant cruise liner as it slowly but mechanically made its way.What did his hometown of Okayama look like now?
Did it smell the same? How were the people handling the depression, the massive earthquake, the West severing trade ties?He was about to find out for himself.He had been traveling for God knows how long at this point because it's 1931.
And it's not like you could just take a flight from LaGuardia to O'Hare to Narita.
Big feelings about O'Hare and Narita.
OK, yes.Good and bad feelings. Yaz had to take a train from New York City, New York City, through flat plains and northwestern mountain valleys, catching a cruise liner from Seattle to Japan over 5,000 ocean miles away.
That's probably like three weeks in total. still preferable to anything O'Hare or Midway or really Chicagoland-based.I guess I gave away my big, big feelings.Your big bites.
You can imagine his mind forming this amalgamation of his childhood nostalgia with the bits and pieces of updates that filtered through those family letters of the past two decades.And he was probably anxious to get there.
The whole reason for that urgent letter in the first place was that his father's health was in rapid decline and there was no guarantee that Yas would even make it in time.
Word of his pending arrival had spread and upon reaching the shore, he was very surprised to be met by reporters and photographers waiting to interview the now famous Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Sort of a paparazzi of sorts.
Wow.Chutters and Japarazzi today.You're trying to get us canceled. Alright boys, here's a composite rendering of an artsy looking fella, a pence of depressed, holes in his shoes type of fella, beret, ascot probably, probably an ascot.
You'll know him by the absence on the breath.The absence on the breath, and the gonorrhea in the air on account of the artist's loose morals.His loose zipper, his loose morals as they like to say.Loose zippers, sink cruise line shippers.
What?Excuse me, what was that?What was that?
I said loose zippers sink cruise line shippers.It's coming on a cruise liner.
Weezer cruise liner.All right, go on.I don't know what accent that was.Not Japanese.
Not transatlantic or trans-Pacific.I don't know.Or really trans-anything.
Yass was going to make the most of this trip, which, again, was not at all how we travel today because he was going to be there for not just a weekend, but the better part of a year.
I don't know when O'Hare was invented, but still preferable.
When was O'Hare invented?Right. So on the way to Japan, probably through letters and telegrams at various train stops, as well as with the help of his gallery back in the US, three exhibitions of Yas's work were organized.
This was also a mix of emotions because while he had always dreamed of exhibiting in Japan and winning the approval of his father for his unconventional life,
There was also that generational and cultural guilt, and he just wished that it was all under different circumstances.
So when he wasn't spending time with his ailing father or meeting separately with his mother because they had divorced decades ago, he spent time growing closer to his half-sisters, visiting the Kurakuen Gardens, which were just like he remembered them.
And walking the city's vaguely familiar streets on the hunt for nostalgic toys and trinkets that he could take back with him, he might have noticed that many of those handcrafted details that once made them so tactile and unique now looked more uniform and manufactured, which made his childhood feel even more distant.
His exhibitions too ended up being like a mixed bag.He had shows of his lithographs and his paintings in Tokyo, Osaka, Okuyama, which featured the familiar OCs in the Kuniyoshi-ist folklore.Hard to say, hard to say.
Like children with noodley fingers, right?Weird cows, oblong still lives, naked ladies probably near sharp things. And on one hand, the arts community welcomed him and were happy to exhibit his work.Parties were thrown.Saki was probably had right.
And even though he didn't sell very many works on account of the depression, on account of the depression, the feedback from his peers was overwhelmingly positive.And there was just a lot of excitement surrounding his work.
It was probably the parallel world to exhibiting his work in the States, you know?There you could view his work as this novel perspective from an outsider, quote unquote, of America.In Japan, they probably got the subtle folklore nods, right?
But then got to experience this completely different viewpoint of America.It wasn't like what they had seen from Hollywood films and Disney films.It was this kuniyoshi. Vision of America.Kuniyoshi's America.Album cover title.
Yeah, that too.Yeah.Okay. Lithography was also pretty much unknown at this time in Japan, and he was actually able to introduce this new medium.
Generally, he felt like the art world in Japan was just more accepting and more supportive than the cutthroat scene of the US.But on the other hand, he was also made painfully aware of how much he had changed, or maybe Japan had changed, or both.
Much like those American critics proclaiming that Yasuo was undeserving of his merits due to his ethnicity, Japan had its haters too, dismissing his work as empty, barbaric, vulgar, and European, which was definitely not a compliment here.
It was a low-key fash code.Okay, for not what we want in this country.
So these opinions were actually also echoed by police officers.Yes, police officers.
Coming in with the censoring stick.
Rubber bullets.I don't know.OK.
OK.Anyway.Anyway, this was a huge problema because many of Yass' works that he had planned to exhibit were of female nude.Yeah.Next to the sharp objects.Probably.Yeah.
So maybe the police were just like concerned about the ladies.
Yes, yes, yes.Well, actually, so yes, they actually made him cover up the nipples of said nudes in chalk or else the show would be shut down.That's the chalk applying.
That's the baton, the chalk baton.Batons made out of chalk.Little people know that.
I said little people know that.
Little people.That's not what I meant. Speaking of censoring, my mom actually used to censor the sirena in the Loteria stack.Yeah, the mermaid.Used to draw a little sharpie bikini.
You're calling your mom fascist.My mother-in-law, you're mom fascist.It's not very nice.I love you, mom.No, my mom was a fascist, too.She would sharpie over the tight, skin-tight superheroine outfits in my comic books.Oh, okay.
You can look at rogues' tits, I guess. can look at Storm's boobs.
Did she have to do the whole page?
I mean, to be fair, they're covered, but it's all there.It's all there.You know, it's all there.
In another encounter, when asking for directions, he was chewed out by a police officer for not taking his hat off and bowing in his presence, which was very disrespectful.But it wasn't really like that.He just wasn't thinking of the honorifics.
Oopsie. That was a microcosm of his experience, okay?While the art world in Japan was very accepting, nurturing, and open-minded, that art world was really, really small.And there was this much larger culture that Kuniyoshi hadn't truly grown up in.
Yes, the Huskiers.Exactly. By the time he boarded that same cruise liner, leaving Japan in February of the next year, he had reconnected with his family, he had planted seeds, but he still fell out of place.
Quote, of course I was glad to see my family and they too.I am glad I came to Japan and saw what it was all about.But after all, I don't belong here and I'm returning to America as soon as I can make it.End quote.
So back to that beautiful film that we actually never introduced, by Mitsuyo Seio, Momotaro no Umiwashi, or Momotaro's Sea Eagles.
Okay, so the cat, the monkey, the dog, the pheasant, they're the sea eagles now.
Point is, point is, they're taking a long trip across the ocean to that ogre infested island, but not on a little boat, not on a little cruise liner, but in a little fighter jet because they're sea eagles.
Which you can see here now is in fact Hawaii.Ah, I wonder what they're doing there.
So mysterious. So I don't want to make it sound like we are villainizing Japan, OK?There's a lot of reasons that these cute little monkeys and dogs wound up here.The U.S.'s involvement definitely being a big reason.
And we will get more into that in part two.
We did not want to make this a two part episode, listeners.Believe us.Believe us.But it just kept it kept expanding.The episode kept expanding.So Japan's animation industry was was pretty shit at this time.
They often had like no budget, they didn't have proper animation equipment, so there was a lot of like looping, time-saving, money-saving animations.Everything just looked really, really raw.
Mitsuyo, by contrast, was throwing like everything at his disposal to make these just look amazing.
And it's going to inspire this generation of anime artists, so you can really thank Momotaro's Sea Eagles here for Astro Boy, Akira, Lane, but also your weebs and your waifus.
The weebs who are driving past our house constantly and making this recording take so long because there's construction.And they've all souped up their cars and put Narita stickers on their cars.Anyway.
Mitsuyo, who poured so much love and detail into this film, as well as the sequel that was even more beautiful and more haunting, was, believe it or not, very against Imperial Japan.
You can imagine him, honestly, being in the crowd at one of Kuniyoshi's shows, and the timeline actually syncs up pretty well.
But at that same time that Kuniyoshi was sipping on some sake and talking some art, Mitsuyo was arrested, tortured, jailed for being an active leftist protester, like actively protesting the increase in fascism in Japan.
And after the war, his work returned to showing disdain for the previous regime.And I think it shows you how complex of a situation this is. It's very messy, and there aren't any winners at all.
When you're living in a country with family, friends, and fellow citizens who have to tacitly accept, or don't think to question, or maybe are too overworked to question, or have no other choice but to be compliant with the country they live in, it's hard to see the many, many dissenting voices, and it's much easier to sum everything up as ogres.
So Yasuo was lucky that he was able to leave, unlike Mitsuyo, and he wasn't going to suffer like many, many Japanese Nikkei were about to on American soil.
And he definitely wasn't gonna suffer like many Japanese were about to suffer in their own homeland.
Larger forces aside, as far as your day-to-day is concerned, it almost always just comes down to what soil you happen to be standing on.
The capital of the United States, December 8th, 1941. Today the Congress of the United States convenes in a solemn joint session.
The session will hear the President of the United States deliver his message that will ask for a declaration of war with Japan.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces.I regret to tell you that very many American lives
have been lost, that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but we'll make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Art Slice - A Palatable Serving of Art History
