Strong Woman and Child

Strong Woman and Child (1925) is one of the great paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's career, a large oil on canvas (57 1/4 × 44 7/8 inches; 145.4 × 114.0 cm) painted during his first extended trip to Paris with his wife Katherine Schmidt and now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (1986.6.50; gift of the Sara Roby Foundation). The picture shows a circus strongwoman in a tight bodice and tights, standing on a stage with the French tricolor entwined as a backdrop, her arm protectively around a small child who leans against her thigh; the strongwoman's powerful biceps, her flat, almost stoic gaze, and the child's frank confrontation with the viewer combine into one of the most distinctive figural compositions of interwar American Modernism. The painting encodes — in the symbolic and faintly theatrical language Kuniyoshi developed in Paris — his own predicament as a Japanese immigrant in 1920s America: the 1924 Immigration Act, signed only the year before, had permanently barred him from American citizenship; his marriage to Katherine Schmidt, a white American painter, had strained relations with her family; and the strongwoman has been read as a stand-in both for Katherine's protective relationship with him and for the maternal protection he could no longer expect from his country of origin. The composition draws on the circus subjects of Jules Pascin, whose work Kuniyoshi had encountered in Paris in 1925 and which would mark his pictorial vocabulary for the rest of his life, and on Picasso's Rose Period saltimbanques of two decades earlier. The painting is one of the touchstones of the Smithsonian's twentieth-century holdings and is regularly reproduced in surveys of Japanese-American art and of American Modernism.