Cafe No. 2

Cafe No. 2 (1935) is a lithograph by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 16 × 11 3/8 inches (image 12 1/2 × 9 7/8 inches), printed by George C. Miller in New York and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.21; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest). The composition shows a young woman in a hat and fur-collared wrap, seated at a small café table by the sea — the horizon visible behind her — and turning toward the viewer with the same half-private, half-public gaze that Kuniyoshi developed for his lone female figures of the 1930s. It is the second of three café lithographs of the mid-1930s and works as a deliberate counterpoint to the 1934 Cafe: where the 1934 print kept its sitter bundled, downcast, and indoors, Cafe No. 2 opens onto the sea, sharpens the figure's costume into the stylish accessories of a moga (modern girl) or her American counterpart, and lifts the gaze toward the viewer. The print's tonal handling — the soft modeling of the fur, the quiet plane of the sea behind — shows Kuniyoshi's full command of the lithographic medium by the mid-1930s, and its quietly stylish, seaside subject ties it to his contemporary Mexican prints, including Taxco, Mexico of the same year. It is one of his most reproduced lithographs.