Landscape with Pond

Painted in pearlescent colors, this wooded landscape is enveloped in shimmering halos. Mottled tones emphasize flatness as they eliminate a horizon line and seem to push forward the squares of open meadow. The artist, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, merged the shifting planes of three-dimensional forms seen in 20th-century European art and the flat backgrounds of Asian art. However, the way in which objects emerge and recede as if conjured in a dream can also be found in the powerful visions and reductive forms of American folk-art paintings and sculpture, which the artist avidly collected. Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906 when he was 13 years old. Though he actively supported the nation during World War II (1939–1945), he was classified by the government as an enemy alien, causing him great hardship.