Watermelon

Watermelon (1927) is one of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's earliest fully realized lithographs, a composition of sheet 19 1/4 × 24 13/16 inches (image 16 5/8 × 20 inches) printed in an edition of fifty by the master New York lithographer George C. Miller and held since 1931 by the Whitney Museum of American Art (31.758; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney), the founding patron of the Whitney Studio Club and of Kuniyoshi's earliest American career. The image shows a single sliced watermelon, its flesh and seeds visible in the foreground against a dark, evenly modulated tonal ground — a still life that brings together the simplified, almost emblematic shape language of his early oil paintings with the inherent tonal richness of the lithographic stone. It is one of a small group of New York still-life lithographs of 1927 (together with Fruit in White Bowl and Landscape) that mark Kuniyoshi's transition from the small body of Paris stones he had pulled with Edmond Desjobert in 1925 toward a settled American lithographic practice; from this moment forward, the lithograph would be his principal print medium for the rest of his life. The melon, with its flat front-on presentation and its slightly off-center placement on the sheet, is also a recognizable Kuniyoshi compositional signature, and the print is regularly reproduced as one of the canonical American still-life lithographs of the interwar period.