Girl with Cigarette 1928

Yasuo Kuniyoshi made this print, Girl with Cigarette, and it's all about the push-and-pull of light and dark. It’s a lithograph, so he probably drew with a grease crayon onto a stone – think about that process, the physical effort, the directness of the hand. Look at the bedclothes, the way the shadows gather and swell. It’s like the fabric is alive, breathing. And that one stockinged leg, emerging from the swirl, there’s something really erotic about it. It’s not explicit, but it’s there in the gesture, in the confident way she holds herself. There's a kind of graphic directness to the marks, almost like an illustration, and that adds to the drama. Kuniyoshi had a tough life, and his later work is more socially conscious. Maybe we see a hint of that here, a sense of defiance, of someone existing outside the norm. It makes me think a little of Käthe Kollwitz, that same raw honesty. Art is always a conversation, right?