Girl with Cigarette 1928

In this moody lithograph, Yasuo Kuniyoshi uses swirling and smudged marks to create an intimate scene of a girl in a corset, reclining in bed with a cigarette. I can just imagine him working with the lithographic crayon, building up the darks, then lifting and scraping to shape the forms. Kuniyoshi was part of a wave of artists exploring modernism and its discontents, after the first world war. He must have been so in his head when he made this! I wonder if he knew, as he worked on this, that he was grappling with themes of identity, alienation, and the complexities of human relationships. There is a melancholy to the image, a sense of quiet contemplation, maybe a hint of defiance, too. It reminds me of other artists of the time, like Edward Hopper, who captured the loneliness of modern life. Artists are always in conversation with each other like that, taking up themes, and looking at things from a different angle. They teach us to see the world in new ways.