Nude at Door

Nude at Door (1928) is a lithograph with chine-collé by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 19 11/16 × 12 3/4 inches (image 13 1/8 × 7 3/8 inches), printed in Paris by the master lithographer Edmond Desjobert during Kuniyoshi's second European trip and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.12; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest) as part of the most important single donation of Kuniyoshi prints. The composition shows a standing female nude, viewed from the front with the door frame and a partial interior wall providing the simplified architectural ground that often surrounds the seated and standing women of his late-1920s and 1930s lithographs. The Desjobert printing — a high-quality French chine-collé impression — gives the figure a soft, atmospheric tonal richness very different from the harder American lithographic black of his New York stones; the Paris prints of 1928 are among the most lyrical and most pictorially Pascinian of all his lithographs. The image is also connected to Kuniyoshi's parallel painting of the same year, with its lone, contemplative nude figures occupying simplified, slightly stage-like interior spaces, and to the Trapeze Artist and Cyclist lithographs of the same Paris trip in which the figure is presented against a similar shallow, almost theatrical ground.