Forming American Art through An Immigrant Artist's Life

Althusser says, ideology is the collection of exploitive apparatuses for the ruling class to enslave exploited individuals' mind, as well as it is the site for the exploited individuals to express their resistance. Artworks are the material existences of ideologies. The recognitions and evaluations that these artworks receive are provided by art communities, including academia, which Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatus. Art history educates the audience to confirm the reproduction of the relations of production. On the other hand, in the modern sense, art is also the battlefield of ideologies. Though art history subjects itself to ideologies, it can be the place to investigate and dispute the ideologies. This paper examines such features of art with the analysis of the reception of artworks by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) during and after his lifetime. Originally from Japan, Kuniyoshi became a very successful "American" artist, who held the first ever living artist retrospective at Whitney Museum of Art in 1948, despite the fact he could never became a citizen because of the discriminatory naturalization laws and even fell into an enemy alien status during WWII. This paper considers Kuniyoshi's achievements as the products of ideologies of both the State and the art communities of the era. It aims to revise the artist's biography with the materialism perspective apart from the notion of genius or the issue of aesthetics. It questions the validity of a scholarly subject, and hopefully it undermines the capitalist value structure based on which the contemporary art world operates.