Cafe

Cafe (1934) is a lithograph with chine-collé by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 10 × 7 7/8 inches mounted on 14 3/4 × 11 9/16 inches, printed in an edition of thirty by Emil Ganso in New York and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.19; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest). The composition shows a bundled woman seated alone at a small café table, a folded newspaper and a glass beside her on the marble top, her body wrapped in a heavy coat and her eyes cast downward in private thought. It is the first of a sequence of three café lithographs of the mid-1930s — Cafe (1934), Cafe No. 2 (1935), and a third Cafe of 1937 — in which Kuniyoshi worked out one of the most recognizable iconographic threads of his mature lithography: the lone female figure at a public table, half exposed and half withdrawn, caught between the social space of the restaurant and the private interior of her own thought. The subject is unmistakably indebted to Pascin's café and brothel scenes, but Kuniyoshi pulls back from Pascin's hectic line into a quieter, more melancholic tonal register, the chine-collé layer giving the figure a soft atmospheric envelope that the artist would not have achieved on the ordinary lithographic stone. The print is one of the most beloved of his 1930s stones and is regularly cited as a touchstone of interwar American figural lithography.