American Art Collaborative

Kuniyoshi immigrated to Los Angeles in 1906 and moved on to New York in 1910, where he studied with Robert Henri. He exhibited with the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, exhibited in Paris and Tokyo, and taught for 20 years at the Art Students League. Based on the artist's trips to the raucous beaches of Coney Island, the buxom bather floating ashore on a miniscule clamshell recalls Botticelli's "Birth of Venus". The solid forms and flattened sense of space, as well as the dark colors, mark this work as belonging to Kuniyoshi's first (and some consider his best) period.