Cows in Pasture

1923

Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Artist, American, born Japan, 1889 - 1953

Two cows stand side-by-side to our right with a path leading to a row of buildings in the distance to our left in this dreamlike, stylized landscape painting. The forms are simplified, angular, and blocky, and seem to be overlapping, though most of the shapes painted with blended strokes. To our right, a black cow stands beyond a brown cow, both facing our left in profile. The heads are triangular and come to exaggerated points under curving horns, and the ribs of the cow closer to us are painted with curving black lines down the body. Their legs also taper to exaggeratedly pointed, tiny hooves. A milk jug sits to our right, behind them. The row of five buildings to our left are created with blocks of white, golden yellow, brick red, and black. A sprig of leaves and a lacy white flower grow to our left on the row of oatmeal-brown rocks jutting up along the bottom edge of the composition. An abstracted shirt-like form floats to our left against the background of teal green that covers the bottom two-thirds of the painting. The area above the buildings is painted with a field of silvery charcoal gray. The artist signed and dated the painting with tiny letters under the brown cow: "Y. Kuniyoshi 23."

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Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s favorite early subject was the cow. He later recollected that “he felt very near to the cow” because he “was born, judging by the Japanese calendar, in a ‘cow year.’” He must have been especially pleased to have been invited by his patron Hamilton Easter Field to study and paint at the summer art colony of Ogunquit, Maine, surrounded by coastal farms. There he “usually . . . [began] with a cow”; not surprisingly, then, Cows in Pasture is one of about 60 such pictures he painted in the 1920s.

The composition’s compressed space and the cows’ large scale and flat profiles reflect Kuniyoshi’s fondness for American folk art, an interest he shared with other members of the Ogunquit colony. The painting’s disjunctive perspective and sharp geometries also suggest the artist’s interest in avant-garde European art, such as that of Paul Cézanne, following the 1913 Armory Show. Curiously, these two traditions shared a tendency toward broad planes of color and dramatic asymmetry with the Japanese art that Kuniyoshi had known in his youth.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Corcoran Collection (Gift of George Biddle)

  • Dimensions

    overall: 51.12 × 76.52 cm (20 1/8 × 30 1/8 in.)
    framed: 24 × 33.94 × 2.19 cm (9 7/16 × 13 3/8 × 7/8 in.)

  • Accession

    2014.136.94

More About this Artwork

Article:  Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

How Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Thomas Hart Benton depicted the humble structures—and how they mask the struggles of farmers today.

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Cows in Pasture, 1923

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; consigned to (Downtown Gallery, New York); sold c. 1926 to George Biddle [1885-1973], Croton-on-Hudson, New York;[1] gift 23 June 1964, subject to life estate, to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washingon; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] Biddle notes that he acquired the painting "from Kuniyoshi directly, who had it at the time with Downtown Gallery; I think about 1926-1928." See Whitney Museum of American Art Artists' Files and Records, 1914-1966, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington: "Kuniyoshi: Oils, 1917-1926 [1948]," reel N688, frames 215 (illus.), 216.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1924

  • Exhibition of "Modern" Pictures Representing Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist Painters, Union League Club, 8-10 April 1924, no. 21.

  • Exhibition of American Art, Galerie de la Chambre Syndicale des Beaux-Arts (under the Auspices of Art Patrons of America), Paris, 5 June - 5 July 1924, no. 103, repro.

1948

  • Yasuo Kuniyoshi Retrospective Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 27 March - 9 May 1948, no. 14.

1976

  • The American Genius: W.W. Corcoran, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 24 January - 4 April 1976, unnumbered catalogue.

1978

  • The American Landscape Tradition, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 31 January - 31 August 1978, unpublished checklist.

  • Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, 7 September - 1 October 1978, no. 2.

1981

  • Animals in American Art: 1880s-1990s, Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York, 4 October 1981 - 17 January 1982, no. 93.

1982

  • Japanese Artists Who Studied in the USA and the American Scene, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 24 July - 11 November 1982, no. 3, repro.

1985

  • Henri's Circle, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 20 April - 16 June 1985, unnumbered checklist.

1996

  • The Shores of a Dream: Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Early Work in America, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, 7 September 1996 - 30 March 1997, catalogue with no checklist, repro.

2005

  • Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, 27 August 2005 - 29 April 2007, checklist no. 82.

2008

  • The American Evolution: A History through Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1 March - 27 July 2008, unpublished checklist.

  • Asian/American/Modern Art. Shifting Currents. 1900-1970, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, 25 October 2008 - 23 August 2009, no. 6, repro.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013 - 28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

1924

  • F. W. "American Art in Paris [exh. review]." Arts 6, no. 2 (August 1924): 107, repro.

1939

  • Cheney, Martha Smathers Chandler. Modern Art in America. New York, 1939: pl. 13.

1973

  • Phillips, Dorothy W. A Catalogue of the Collection of American Paintings in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Vol. 2: Painters born from 1850 to 1910. Washington, 1973: 142, repro., 143.

1978

  • Zafran, Eric M. "Kuniyoshi Retrospective." Bulletin of the Chrysler Museum of Art 7, no. 9 (September 1978): n.p.

1991

  • Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, and Yoshio Ozawa. Yasuo Kuniyoshi: Neo, Amerikan, atisuto no kiseki. Okayama, Japan, 1991: n.p.

2000

  • Cash, Sarah, with Terrie Sultan. American Treasures of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. New York, 2000: 180, repro.

2007

  • Bennett, Lennie. "The Coming of Age of American Art [exh. review]." St. Petersburg Times (18 February 2007): 8L.

2009

  • Greenhalgh, Adam. "Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Cows in Pasture." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 9, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 15-21.

2011

  • Greenhalgh, Adam. "Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Cows in Pasture." In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 232-233, 281, repro.

Inscriptions

lower center right: Y.Kuniyoshi 23

Wikidata ID

Q46634190

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