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“I am much more interested in painting women, because woman is more decorative, and I think for me to admire woman is natural,” wrote artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi in his unpublished autobiography, now preserved in the Archives of American Art. “I paint universal woman, as I dream woman should be.”

Kuniyoshi was born in 1889 in Okayama, Japan, and immigrated alone to the United States in 1906, when he was only 17. The reasons for his move are now lost to history, says Tom Wolf, a Kuniyoshi scholar who teaches at Bard College; he may have come to the US seeking his fortune, or simply an adventure. It was this early migration, as well as a love for the female form, that would inform Kuniyoshi’s work throughout his life. This includes the lithographs he produced as a member of the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project—a New Deal program for underemployed artists—several of which depicted one of his favorite subjects: female circus performers.

Upon arrival in Los Angeles, the teenage Kuniyoshi took odd jobs to support himself and enrolled in a public high school, where a teacher encouraged him to pursue art. He took the advice to heart; after high school, he had a brief stint at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design before traveling east to New York. Once there, he attended the Art Students League and fell in with the Penguin Club, a group of hard-partying progressive artists. Kuniyoshi was very social and outgoing—he would complain to a gallerist early on in his career that she didn’t throw enough parties—and he fit right in with the New York art scene. Manhattan would become his home base for the rest of his life, although he would eventually split his time between the city and an artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York.

Kuniyoshi’s status in the United States—that of a Japanese immigrant—was one that mainstream white America would not let him forget. In a 1937 Esquire article, he spoke with frustration of having his work constantly examined through the lens of his race: “I can’t very much be Oriental,” he told the reporter. “I have spent most of my life here. I have been educated here and I have suffered here. I am as much of an individual as anyone—except that I have Oriental blood in my veins.”

The interview was given two years after Kuniyoshi painted one of his seminal works, Daily News (1935). The women he painted were often nude or partially clothed, with exaggerated proportions that nodded to the influence of folk art. In the painting, a woman wearing only a scarf, slip, and stockings stares pensively out of the frame, clutching a cigarette in one hand and a newspaper in the other, a pose that would appear in several of his paintings in the 1930s. Kuniyoshi—who had visited Japan in 1931, as its military was invading the region of China called Manchuria—was “keenly aware of the rise of Japanese militarism and he took an explicit public stand against the policies of his native country,” writes Tom Wolf, in his 2015 monograph of the artist, The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. These women, Wolf argues, are “projections of the artist’s mental state.” Wolf suggests that Kuniyoshi may have expressed his anxiety over rising tensions in his birth country—and the subsequent repercussions for Japanese people in the United States—through the imagined bodies of women. Women who were ostensibly white and painted from white models.

In her 2015 book Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, art historian Jacqueline Francis points out that the women in Kuniyoshi’s paintings, while appearing “white,” tend to have skin of different hues; the subject of Daily News takes on the gray tone of a nearby radiator. The painter made “whiteness strange,” she argues; these women, “reflect Kuniyoshi’s “thinking about the complexity of identity and appearances.”

Kuniyoshi’s representation of female bodies was as complicated as his relationship to his adopted country. Although he was eligible to receive employment through the Federal Art Project, he could not become an American citizen; any person born in Japan was barred from becoming a legal citizen until 1952.

His stint with the Federal Art Project ended in 1937, when the WPA purged 3,167 enrollees without American citizenship. In 1941, following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were reclassified as “enemy aliens” by the US government. Kuniyoshi’s radio, camera, and binoculars were confiscated. All of a sudden, he was required to notify officials if he planned to travel even the short distance from his Manhattan apartment to his house in Woodstock.

Still, Kuniyoshi volunteered his services to the war effort, penning speeches for the Voice of America radio program and making anti-Japan posters for the Office of War Information, a government program that had absorbed many artists formerly employed by the Works Progress Administration. While an enemy alien, Kuniyoshi was allowed to create art as long as it was propaganda. During this time, Kuniyoshi created works that depicted explicitly Asian bodies, such as in the 1942 drawing Killer, or Chinese Woman Praying, in which a Japanese soldier swings his rifle at the titular woman. While his art would depict the brutality of the Japanese army, he still felt sorrow for Japanese civilians and Japanese-Americans caught in the crossfire, especially those interned in camps on the West Coast. “If a man feels deeply about the war, or any sorrow or gladness, his feeling should be symbolized in his expression, no matter what medium he chooses,” he wrote in his 1944 autobiography.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 finally allowed all immigrants, regardless of their country of origin, to apply for citizenship. Kuniyoshi wanted to apply, but it was too late: he was already dying of cancer. The artist, who had lived in the United States for more than 45 years, never filled out the paperwork. His ex-wife, Katherine Schmidt, visited Kuniyoshi on his deathbed. She later recalled that the artist was a bon vivant until the end. “He got a nurse to bring out a pint of whiskey and he had a tablespoonful and we all had a drink with him,” she told an interviewer in 1969. “He said goodbye to us.”