Be a Clown!

All the world loves a clown—especially during National Clown Week, August 1–7.

These satiric and edgy clowns are painted by artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

After immigrating to the United States in 1906, Kuniyoshi lived briefly in Seattle, then moved to Los Angeles and subsequently to New York where he studied at the Robert Henri School, the Independent School, and at the Art Students League.… A social realist during much of his career, Kuniyoshi has ranged stylistically from experiments with hard-edged volumetric form and distorted space to fluid strokes and soft edges.… During the last five years of his life, especially, Kuniyoshi's sympathetic social realist themes gave way to brilliant color and once again to geometric designs, as seen here in Fakirs, from 1951.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Pictured: Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1889 Japan–1953 USA, Fakirs, 1951, oil, 50 1/4 x 23 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.