14th Street (Primary Title)
Bumpei Usui, American, born Nagano, Japan, 1898 - 1994 (Artist)
Bumpei Usui belonged to a large Japanese American circle whose members were active in the progressive art world of New York City between the World Wars. Born in Nagano, Japan, and living in London by 1917, Usui settled in New York in 1921, establishing a trade in designing furniture and frames for a wide range of clients. Through his frame making, he became interested in art and began painting. The glowing palette, matte finish, and expressive lines of 14th Street are representative of Usui’s signature style. The picture’s subject and style suggest a Precisionist approach—a term first applied in the 1920s to a diverse group of artists who favored precisely delineated form, composition, and subject matter to express the new industrial aesthetic of modernism. The Precisionists took as their primary subject the simple geometric forms of machines and urban life—particularly skyscrapers.
JapanAmerica: Points of Contact, 1876 – 1970, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, August 27 – December 18, 2016; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, February 12 – May 21, 2017
Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, October 28, 2011 - January 29, 2012; Dallas Museum of Art, February 24 - May 27, 2012; Cleveland Museum of Art, July 1 - September 16, 2012
Some object records are not complete and do not reflect VMFA's full and current knowledge. VMFA makes routine updates as records are reviewed and enhanced.
