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待つ (Waiting) by 國吉康雄 / Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Japanese American) - Oil on canvas / 1938 - National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Japan) #WomenInArt #MOMAT #YasuoKuniyoshi #國吉康雄 #Kuniyoshi #東京国立近代美術館 #ModernArt #art #ArtText #JapaneseArt #JapaneseArtist #PortraitofaWoman #NationalMuseumOfModernArtTokyo
A young woman sits at a table, angled left, her posture heavy with thought. Her skin is rendered in pale, chalky tones against a deep green, softly mottled background. She wears a fitted white short-sleeved top. Over her hair is a rust-red headscarf that frames her face under a pointed overhang with a dark floral ornament and ties under her chin. Her eyebrows knit faintly. Her eyes look down and away rather than meeting ours. One hand rests across her lap while the other lifts toward her mouth, holding a slender white cigarette between her fingers. In the foreground, a small stemmed wine glass with a dark amber drink sits on the table, its rim catching a little light. The table edge cuts diagonally across the lower frame, creating a quiet distance between us and the woman, as if we’ve arrived mid-thought. Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (國吉康雄) builds tension through restraint via a limited palette, softened edges, and a face partly shadowed, making emotion feel present but not fully readable. The title “Waiting” turns the scene into time made visible like an in-between moment where the body holds what the voice doesn’t say. The cigarette and drink could be small rituals of endurance or perhaps individuality, while the headscarf is both protective and enclosing so it intensifies the sense of interiority. Painted in 1938, the work also sits in a world darkening with political violence and uncertainty. Kuniyoshi’s figurative language often channels that unease through intimate, everyday subjects rather than grand events. The result is a portrait of suspended agency that’s not passive, but poised showing someone thinking, bracing, and staying with her own mind until whatever comes next finally arrives.
February 16, 2026 at 4:20 AM
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Umi (海 / The Sea) by Koga Harue / 古賀春江 (Japanese) - Oil on canvas / 1929 - National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Japan) #WomenInArt #art #BlueskyArt #ModernArt #JapaneseArt #KogaHarue #古賀春江 #MOMAT #東京国立近代美術館 #NationalMuseumofModernArtTokyo #Koga #artText #artwork #JapaneseArtist #surrealism #超現実主義
In "Umi" (海) aka "The Sea," Japanese artist Koga Harue (古賀春江) composes a vast, dreamlike tableau where machines, nature, and humans exist in uneasy harmony. The painting depicts a seaside scene, but closer inspection reveals a montage of unlikely companions: an airship floats above like a massive bird, while a submarine glides beneath the water, its inner workings exposed to view. Fish and sea creatures drift nearby, rendered in the same calm, measured style as industrial smokestacks that rise along the left edge. At the right, a woman in an old-school swimsuit raises one arm, her upright form echoed by the tower-like industrial plant across the canvas. According to MOMAT (the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), it's a contrast of things that fly (bird and airship) and things that swim (fish and submarine) as well as things that stand upright (the woman and the factory). We see multiple such pairs of "natural things" and "artificial things" that closely resemble each other. It's also interesting (to me) that the woman is reportedly based on a postcard of the famous Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson. Koga drew many of his motifs from mass media and scientific journals, including German popular-science magazines that circulated in Japan. Rather than narrating a linear story, he painted items like a collage, so meaning emerges through analogy and juxtaposition. The submarine’s cut-away transparency exemplifies what Koga described as his desire to “compensate for the incompleteness of reality and help direct reality toward a future that is complete.” Created in 1929, as Japan’s modernization accelerated, "Umi" has been read both as a poetic fascination with the romance of the machine and as a subtle premonition of the militarization to come. The painting resists fixed allegory. Its power lies in unsettling pairings of natural and artificial, human and industrial, visible and hidden for a vision of the modern world's dreams, contradictions, and fragile balances.
September 25, 2025 at 9:35 PM