Yasuo Kuniyoshi emigrated to America in 1906. He studied at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design from 1907 to 1910 before moving to New York where he studied at the National Academy of Design and later with Robert Henri. He quickly fell into the progressive, if not the most avant-garde, circles of the New York art world, joining the Art Student's League in 1917 and summering at artist's colonies in Ogunquit, Maine, and Woodstock, N.Y. In 1925 and 1928 he traveled to Europe and in 1931 to his native Japan. He remained active as a painter, printmaker, and photographer throughout the war years, alhough his work grew increasingly complex in its facture and uneasy in its imagery. Kuniyoshi's first paintings, work of evocative humor and fantasy, date to the early 1920's. They demonstrate a sensibility quite unlike that of his precisionist colleagues, one less interested in the urban landscape or in the observation and reduction of its foms. His still-life drawings from these same years, such as "Leaves in a Vase", show a more simplified viewpoint and delicate line, but they nonetheless pulse with fantastical, of sensuous, vitality. Kuniyoshi, like Demuth and other artists of the twenties, used the still life subject as a point of departure for experiments in arrangement, perspective, and composition. But, like Georgia O'Keeffe, he also used the subject to explore the symbolist and expressive content of organic forms.