Dismissed WPA Chinese and Japanese Artists Express Unity in Paintings at ACA Gallery
The New York art season is getting under way. Galleries in the Champagne Belt are brushing the summer’s cobwebs from the ceiling corners and oiling the door hinges. Collectors, professional and amateur, have returned to the city. The critics have returned from their summer wanderings prepared, as far as adjectives are concerned, for whatever may befall them.
One gallery has kept the torch bright during the past months, spreading both heat and light. The A. C. A. Gallery, 52 West 8th Street, has been staunch in its support of the pink slip artists of The Federal Art Project, having given them three consecutive shows.
The current one is of great importance. Chinese and Japanese artists are exhibiting together, symbolizing their common persecution as aliens without the right to apply for citizenship in a more oblique way, but in a sharper manner, they represent the unity of the Chinese and the Japanese people against the Japanese war-machine.
Dismissed from Art Field
However, it is on the basis of their work as artists that this group presents its case. Victims of the most reprehensible type of legislative discrimination on WPA, they are in serious danger of being wiped out of the art field.
In his prefatory statement, Harry Gottlieb, president of the Artists’ Union, one of the sponsoring organizations, states the case simply, “As artists this group has made important contributions to our cultural life. They have exhibited in American museums and galleries. They are members of American artists organizations and are accepted as American artists. Their dismissal not only deprives the country of their talent, but in effect, denies their right to be artists.”
The exhibition’s level is high, with Chuzo Tamotzu and Yasuo Kuniyoshi representing the high water marks. Tamotzu’s “Jersey Station” is a sober harmony of greens and browns, with, a breath-taking freshness in the handling of the palette knife.
Kuniyoshi’s painting of a demimondaine in a wicker chair is as fine in its aristocratic greys and sensuous drawing as anything the artist has done which means that it is very fine indeed.
Eitaro Ishigaki devotes two pictures to the feats of the Basque women who hurled the Italian “volunteers” into the sea. Sakari Suzuki has three solidly constructed conceptions, ingratiatingly painted; C. Yamasaki’s “Noonday Rest” is good solid painting with genuine feeling; Don Gook Wu’s “Unlovely Sunset” is wild Expressionism a la Orient; Thomas Nagai’s gouache and water colors are able renditions of mood and place.
Other exhibitors are Yosei Amemiya, Roy Kadowaki, Kaname Miyamoto, Fuji Nakamizo, Kiyoshi Shimisu, George Tera, Moo-Wee Tiam, Bunji Tagawa, Chu H. Jor and C. W. Young.
September 18, 1937
Chinese Artists Join Japanese in WPA Job ProtestArt Front
Forget War in Fighting Project Exclusion—“Fail to Support” China Invasion
While their fellow-countrymen were fighting it out to the death 10,000 miles away, many of New York’s Chinese and Japanese artists collaborated this week in a joint art exhibition at the A. C. A. Gallery under sponsorship of the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress.
Though the artists manifested their solidarity in the face of the Sino-Japanese conflict, the primary motivation for their show arose not from the situation in the Far East but that in the United States. I refer to the exclusion of noncitizens from WPA jobs.
Because of their ineligibility for American citizenship, the discrimination against Orientals was 100 per cent. Let Chuzo Tamotzu, delegate of the Japanese-Chinese group on the recent job march to Washington, sum up the situation:
“Most of us have been here at least fifteen to twenty-five years, living and working as American artists, and accepted as such. For example, Kuniyoshi has been invited to the Carnegie International not as a Japanese but as an American.
Still Subject to the Draft
“We expect to continue to live here. In the event of war, we should be subject to the draft, just as we were in the last war. Why, then, should we be discriminated against in social benefits?
“I might add that we want to live here peacefully and as advocates of peace and culture, in harmony with the peace policy of the present United States Administration. Thus we have nothing to do with support of the Japanese Army now unjustly invading China.”
This is a case that does not have to be supported on principles alone. The exhibit presents achievements which were largely made possible, except in the case of Kuniyoshi, by WPA. They are now deprived of its support.
Exhibit Excellent Work
There is the powerful thrust of Ishigaki’s aroused peasants and workers, the forceful symbolist work of Suzuki, the sensitive naturalism of Tamotzu and the light fancy of Nagai. Sober strength marks Tagawa’s “Chinese Toilers.” Excellent textural quality is found in a still life by a quite new exhibitor, Kiyoshi Shimizu.
G. [sic] W. Young’s impressionist landscapes and Don Gook Wu’s more subjectively accented canvases are the most interesting work by Chinese-born painters.
Here, then, is a challenge to liberals. A group of artists active in the midst of American cultural life has been legally put beyond the pale. Can progressives afford to rest until this reactionary step which narrows the base of American culture has been rescinded?
Chinese and Japanese ArtistsWhile the minions of Mitsui and Mitsubishi are pouring death on China from the sea and air and the torn bodies of women and children writhe in the shattered cities, American reactionaries are conducting their own offensive against American Orientals. With the impartiality characteristic of American diplomacy, which goes in for “neutrality” measures like the current embargo against both imperialist Japan and bleeding China, the W.P.A. Administration has ruled all aliens off the projects. This includes, of course, all those who are prohibited by law from becoming citizens. Since only white aliens and those of African descent are eligible for citizenship, Asiatics find themselves on the proscribed list.Japanese and Chinese artists have just concluded an exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery, welding in common persecution their collective desire to function as artists and Americans. Sponsored by the Artists Union, the Artists’ Congress and the Citizens’ Committee for Support of W.P.A., the exhibition indicated the contributions of the Chinese and Japanese to American culture.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, for instance, who is represented in many American museums as an American artist, and who was invited to the Carnegie International as an American, is a major influence in our art life. Not on W.P.A., Kuniyoshi sent one of his finest canvasses and several lithographs to the show as a gesture of solidarity with his brother artists and Orientals.
With W.P.A. support withdrawn and the chances of private patronage as remote as ever, these Japanese-American and Chinese-American artists are in serious danger of being eliminated from the art field, to say nothing of life itself. And, despite their great contribution to American culture, they will become the victims of reaction unless the liberal and progressive forces get busy and build a strong defense.
In the exhibition are the vibrant landscapes of Chuso Tamotsu, with “Jersey Station” and “Firetrap” outstanding in their quiet harmonies of green and brown: the anti-imperialist canvases of Eitaro Ishigaki, with two Spanish subjects of Basque women hurling Italian fascist “volunteers” into the sea; the sensitive water-colors and gouaches of Thomas Nagai; the socially symbolic montages of Sakari Suzuki; Don Gook Wu’s colorful impressionism and work by C. Yamasaki, Yosei Amemiya, Roy Kadowaki, Kaname Miyamoto, Fuji Nakamizo, Kiyoshi Shimisu, George Tera, Moo-Wee Tiam, Bunji Tagawa, Chu H. Jor and C. W. Young.
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