New England Landscape

New England Landscape (1941) is a lithograph by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 11 3/4 × 16 inches (image 9 3/4 × 13 3/4 inches), printed in an edition of thirty-five by George C. Miller in New York and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.25; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest). The composition turns from the lone female figures and circus performers of the 1930s prints to a quiet, faintly melancholic New England landscape: rolling fields, scattered farm buildings, and a distant horizon under a low and lightly toned sky. The print was made during the artist's repeated summers at the Maine artists' colony of Ogunquit, where he had worked from 1918 onward and which remained one of the principal settings of his pastoral imagery throughout his career. The 1941 date situates the print precisely on the eve of the United States' entry into the Second World War — Pearl Harbor was attacked in December of that year — and at the moment when Kuniyoshi's Japanese citizenship would suddenly place him in the painful and contradictory position of being both an enemy alien and a public anti-fascist intellectual. The quiet, almost elegiac handling of the New England landscape in this print can be read against that historical moment: it is one of the last lithographs in which the contemplative pastoral subject of his early career is allowed to stand without explicit political intrusion. The print remains one of his most widely reproduced landscape stones.