Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita

Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita, born Fujita Tsuguharu on 27 November 1886 and died on 29 January 1968, was a Japanese French painter and printmaker who built an eclectic style out of both Japanese and European traditions.

Early life in Japan

Foujita was born in Ushigome, a former ward of Tokyo now part of Shinjuku, the son of an army medical director. He decided as an adolescent to become a painter, and at fourteen one of his watercolours was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris among works by Japanese middle school pupils. In 1905 he enrolled at what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, studying yoga, or western style painting, under Seiki Kuroda, as well as nihonga. He graduated in 1910, married the schoolteacher Tomiko Tokita in 1911, and left for Paris in 1913 at the age of twenty seven.

Paris and the School of Paris

Settling in Montparnasse, Foujita entered the cosmopolitan milieu later known as the Ecole de Paris. He shared a studio with the painter Riichiro Kawashima, met Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine at the Cite Falguiere, and visited the studios of Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. Unlike many Japanese painters in the city he worked chiefly in watercolour and made a deliberate effort to adapt, francising his signature from Fujita to Foujita. His first solo exhibition at the Galerie Cheron, secured through his second wife Fernande Barrey, presented 110 watercolours and was a considerable success. He joined the Salon d'Automne in 1920.

During the 1920s his production concentrated on self portraits, interiors and nudes. He developed the fine black contour and pale, almost porcelain ground that became his signature, drawing on ukiyo e artists such as Harunobu and Utamaro who left the skin of their figures uncoloured. Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy, for which Kiki de Montparnasse posed, was acclaimed at the Salon d'Automne of 1922. With his bowl cut and round glasses he became one of the most recognisable figures of the annees folles.

Travels, war and controversy

Pressed by unpaid taxes, Foujita left France in 1931 and travelled for three years through Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, an experience that convinced him public art should address the masses. He returned to Japan at the end of 1933. From 1938 he worked as an official war artist, and in 1943 became vice chairman of the Army Art Association, producing monumental battle paintings such as Battle of Nomonhan and Last Stand at Attu. After the Japanese defeat his reputation suffered severely, and the Japan Art Association named him in 1946 among artists held responsible for the war.

Final years in France

After an unhappy period teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1949, Foujita returned to France in 1950 and declared he would never leave again. He and his fifth wife Kimiyo took French nationality in 1955, and he was made an officer of the Legion of Honour in 1957. The couple were baptised in Reims Cathedral in 1959, when he took the Christian name Leonard, and religious subjects dominated his late work. From 1963 he designed and frescoed the Chapel of Our Lady of Peace at Reims, which opened in 1966. He died of cancer in Zurich in 1968 and was ultimately reinterred beneath the chapel.

Legacy and collections

In France Foujita remains bound up with the Montparnasse of the 1920s, while in Japan his wartime work keeps his standing contested. Retrospectives since 2006 have sought to place his whole career in view. His works are held by the Centre Pompidou, the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musee de Grenoble, La Piscine at Roubaix, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Artizon Museum, and the Hirano Masakichi Art Museum in Akita, which holds more than a hundred.