Before the Act

Before the Act (1932) is a lithograph by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 17 1/2 × 12 9/16 inches (image 13 1/8 × 9 1/2 inches), printed in an edition of forty by Emil Ganso in New York and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.17; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest). The composition shows a circus performer in a brief costume — striped tights, tight bodice — leaning against the flank of a horse under the canvas of a circus tent, the two figures arranged in a profile frieze against a darkly toned background. The image belongs to the major group of circus subjects that Kuniyoshi began in the late 1920s and continued through the 1930s, and that became one of the most important iconographic strands of his mature work alongside the lone female figure and the still life. The circus was, for Kuniyoshi as for Picasso and Pascin before him, a setting of distance and theatricality in which the performer could be presented in a moment of waiting between acts — neither fully on stage nor fully in private — and the title Before the Act crystallizes that interstitial dramatic position. The print combines a tonal richness in the dark backgrounds and the curving body of the horse with a tight, almost classical drawing of the performer's body, and is one of the most widely reproduced of his 1932 stones.