Tsuguharu Foujita

Biography of Tsuguharu Foujita ( 1886-1968 )

"Only the power of art can overcome borders and the barrier of races to penetrate the heart of man" Foujita 1929

Tsuguharu Foujita was born in Tokyo in 1886 into an educated and prosperous family. His father, a general in the imperial army, saw his son's talent for drawing at an early age and encouraged him in this direction. The child was interested in many disciplines including science and literature and enjoyed a childhood in a Japan that was opening up to the world.
At the age of 14, a drawing by the boy was selected for the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The attraction for the city of light was born. According to his father's wishes, the young artist first attended the Tokyo Fine Arts School where he joined the oil painting department while learning French at the Etoile du matin. He graduated in 1910, and three years later left for Paris. He naturally settled in Montparnasse where the cosmopolitan community welcomed him.

Too old to enroll in the Beaux-Arts in Paris, Foujita took a copyist's card at the Louvre and immersed himself in antiques as well as in Parisian life. Drawing on his Japanese culture, the artist cultivated his samurai image and very quickly his singular allure - earrings, tattoos, hand-cut clothes, bangs and round glasses - made him an icon of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties.
His first exhibition in 1917 at the Georges Chéron Gallery, a dealer for Modigliani and Soutine, was a real success. His unique art creates a bridge between the ancestral tradition of the art of calligraphy of his native Japan and European art whose volumes fascinated him. At the end of the 1920s, he created a white paste whose unique composition allowed him to mix oil paint and Chinese ink and thus obtain skin tones with opalescent reflections.
Foujita immersed himself in the pose of his models before elaborating a preparatory drawing, without repentance. Then on the canvas and in his absence, the model "is reduced to his soul, to a network of lines of extreme sensitivity, carriers of life. For, with Foujita, the essence of the model is in the line: "The line is alive. And the interval that settles in the in-between, the emptiness that the lines provide between them, is a constituent element of the line and the work. This is the ma, an aesthetic concept that has always governed Japanese art, from which Foujita never deviates," according to Sylvie Buisson, a specialist in the painter. Eager to "represent the quality of the most beautiful material, that of human skin," Foujita appropriated a genre: the nude, which was largely absent from Japanese painting.

Nudes, self-portraits, cats and children will punctuate the works of the painter. He worked extensively, loving the solitude of his studio. A key figure of the avant-garde, Foujita worked tirelessly but his image as a dandy figure of the nights of Montparnasse sometimes takes precedence over his work. Lucie Badoud, nicknamed Youki - which means snow in Japanese - his muse and companion since 1922 inspired his most beautiful nudes. But in the early 1930s, she left for Robert Desnos and the painter began a new wandering. In 1931, he embarked for Rio de Janeiro in the company of a young dancer and model Madeleine Lequeux, not without having previously given up all his paintings to Youki. The two years spent in Latin America gave him a new artistic impetus and in the fall of 1933 he returned to Japan, which he had left 20 years earlier. He stayed briefly in France on the eve of the war but was soon forced to return to his native country where he had to take on the role of chief painter for the Japanese army between 1940 and 1945. 

The call of France was felt more and more and Foujita returned to live there permanently in 1950. He even obtained French nationality in 1955. In 1960, he settled in Villiers-le-Bâcle with his last wife Kimiyo, where he restored a ruined house. He then divided his time between his studio in Montparnasse and his house overlooking the Bièvre valley. Touched by grace during a visit to the Basilica of Saint-Rémi in Reims, Foujita converted to Catholicism. Tsuguharu became Leonard on October 29, 1959, the day of his baptism, no doubt in honor of the master Leonardo da Vinci whose work he admired. He spent the last years of his life in a mystical atmosphere that can be found in his paintings and drawings. The last great work of his life is the realization of the chapel Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix which will be built in Rheims between 1963 and 1966. He entirely realized the fresco decoration, but also the architecture and the stained glass windows. 

The house in Villers-le-Bâcle, bequeathed by Foujita's widow with a large part of his works to the Essonne department in 1991, had been preserved in its original state since the painter's death in 1968. It has been restored and opened to the public since September 2000. One can thus discover the intimacy of the most Japanese of French painters whose work still retains a unique grace through a style that will never be truly Japanese, nor truly French. A multi-talented creator, Foujita was just as much a draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, ceramist, photographer, filmmaker, fashion designer, as he was a designer and architect.