Fruit in White Bowl

Fruit in White Bowl (1927) is a black-and-white lithograph by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 15 1/2 × 20 1/2 inches (image 13 7/8 × 16 1/4 inches), printed in an edition of fifty by George C. Miller in New York and held since 1931 by the Whitney Museum of American Art (31.757; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney). The composition shows a deep white bowl heaped with rounded fruit — apples or pears — set on a dark, faintly modulated table surface, the bowl's wide ovoid silhouette making up the principal pictorial event of the image. It is a companion piece to Watermelon (1927) and Landscape (1927), all printed in the same year and acquired by the Whitney as part of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's foundational gift of Kuniyoshi prints; together the three lithographs document the moment at which Kuniyoshi's lithographic practice settled into the New York studio idiom — a tonal richness, a simplified shape language, a quiet still-life or pastoral subject — that would define his prints for the next quarter-century. The print's bold, almost emblematic ovoid bowl and its quiet, contemplative subject also tie it to the still-life paintings of the same period, notably Bouquet and Stove (1929) and Rolls on a Chair (1930), in which Kuniyoshi worked out the contemplative table-top compositions that anchor much of his pictorial language.