Taxco, Mexico

Taxco, Mexico (1935) is a lithograph by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, sheet 15 15/16 × 22 13/16 inches (image 12 × 13 1/2 in.), printed in an edition of thirty-five by George C. Miller in New York and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art (81.43.26; Katherine Schmidt Shubert Bequest). The composition shows a youthful figure seated on a stone ledge at the silver-mining town of Taxco in the Guerrero region of central Mexico, playing a wind instrument, accompanied by a small dog and a hanging theatrical mask. The print belongs to a body of work that Kuniyoshi made after a trip to Mexico in 1935 — a period when the Mexican muralists' movement, John Sloan's American Indian experiments at Santa Fe, and the new American interest in inter-American cultural exchange had drawn many New York artists south. Taxco itself had become a popular destination for American artists in the 1930s, and Kuniyoshi's print captures both the picturesque street life of the colonial town and his own lifelong attention to theatrical and circus subjects, drawing on the hanging mask and the wind instrument as quietly emblematic stage properties. It is among the most widely reproduced of his mid-1930s lithographs.