BROOKLYN, NY.- 511 Gallery and 511 Projects announced the placement of the early twentieth-century painting, Bronx, N.Y. (1924) by the Japanese American modernist painter, Bumpei Usui, into the American Art Collection at the Brooklyn Museum.

Bumpei Usui was born in Nagano prefecture, Japan, the third child in a family that worked in the farming of silkworms and the producing of raw silk. The dates of his emigrating from Japan and his whereabouts in the first decade of the century are unclear, but circa 1917, he was in London, working in a furniture factory designing “Oriental” furniture, and it is known that by 1921 he had arrived in New York City, had set up a framing shop on East 14th Street, and was taking art classes at the Art Students League. He was soon framing the works of many of the city’s top modernist artists – John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Yasuo Kunyoshi chief among them – while continuing his own art-making after shop hours. In quick order his colleagues encouraged him to spend more time painting, and Usui was soon exhibiting his work alongside those of his artist friends as well as with art in specifically Japanese-focused art shows in New York City. During most of the Depression and wartime years, like many Asian artists, his work was shown entirely locally and in small venues, but by 1936, Usui was an acknowledged artist in the Federal Art Project (FAP), and his oil painting, Coal Barges (still unlocated), was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936-37 New Horizons in American Art show of selected FAP artists, in the “Easel Project: Oil Paintings” section.

Bronx, N.Y. is a recognizable scene and yet also a modernist and somewhat un-real site that asks more questions and leaves interpretation of meaning up to the viewer. There is obvious contrast between the human-made construction site and its surrounding bucolic nature, but Usui employs techniques of composition, palette, size, and scale to blur the distinctions between the two. Despite the implied human presence, there are no figures visible. The site is at rest – whether at a lunch “break” or before or after working hours, we do not know for sure. But there is an unmistakable, eerie silence that we sense in the site, stillness in a setting that is supposed to be filled with sound and motion. Though seemingly of a specific site, the painting has more contexts than simply its real landscape, offering up important considerations such as industrialization and the economy of early twentieth-century America, migration and immigration, ethnic, class and cultural diverseness, art museums and their practices – to name just a few. From a viewing perspective, one possible reading is that the artist is depicting a critical turning-point in the balance of nature vs. culture in American life, art and history.
 
Bumpei Usui’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Heckscher Museum and the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. 511 Gallery and 511 Projects is pleased to have been a part of several of those acquisitions as our mission from our inception in 2002 has been to place fine art in public institutions, and we would like to thank Professor Tom Wolf at Bard College and Joel Rosenkranz of Conner Rosenkranz for their assistance with research and guidance to research sources here and abroad over these past years as we worked to widen the exposure and appreciation of the artwork made by this important modernist Asian American artist.