Island of Happiness

Island of Happiness (1924) is an oil on canvas by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, one of a cluster of figural compositions painted in his second and third years as a recognized New York exhibiting artist, in the period between his first solo show at the Daniel Gallery (1922) and his first European trip with Katherine Schmidt (1925). The title is characteristic of Kuniyoshi's fable-like early subject matter — alongside Strong Woman and Child, The Twist Loaf, and Dream — and the composition, with its small group of figures on an isolated, plate-like piece of land, shows the artist working out the simplified, slightly archaic spatial vocabulary that he developed in dialogue with Kenneth Hayes Miller's structured figure-drawing and with the folk-art traditions of his Okayama childhood. The picture belongs to a period in which Kuniyoshi's palette was still dominated by the earthy reds, ochres, and dark greens of his earliest cow paintings, before the smoky Pascin-derived tonality of his post-Paris work took over in the later 1920s. The work is preserved on Wikimedia Commons from a 1924 reproduction and remains one of the canonical compositions of his early career; it is frequently cited in surveys of twentieth-century Japanese-American Modernism.