藤田嗣治

Born on November 27, 1886 (Meiji 19) in Shin’ogawamachi, Ushigome-ku, Tokyo (close to present-day Iidabashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), the second son and last child of Fujita Tsuguakira and Masa. Tsuguakira later rose to the rank of Army Lieutenant General and Army Surgeon General. His father’s work meant that the family moved to Kumamoto when Tsuguharu was a child, and Tsuguharu returned to Tokyo in 1898. He attended the Elementary School attached to the Tokyo Higher Normal School, then graduated from that school’s middle school. He decided that he wanted to become a painter when he was in middle school, and studied French at the night school of Gyōsei Junior High School as he planned his future study in Paris. In April 1905 he entered the preparatory course of Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo Fine Arts School, present-day Tokyo University of the Arts), and then entered the Western-style painting department that September. There he learned the “plein air” painting style practiced by Kuroda Seiki and others. While in school he received his first “selected” status for a painting submitted to the Eleventh Hakubakai (White Horse Society) exhibition. In March 1910, he graduated from the school. He assisted one of his teachers Wada Eisaku with Imperial Theater decoration work and other projects while waiting for an opportunity to travel to France. He submitted a succession of works to the Tokyo Industrial Exposition, Hakubakai exhibitions, and those of the Kōfūkai Art Association, but left Japan for France before achieving “selected” status at the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition (Bunten). He had started living with Tokita Tomi, a graduate of Joshi Bijutsu Gakkō (Private Women's School of Fine Arts, present-day Joshibi University of Art and Design),, but then in the summer of 1913, set off for France on his own. In August 1913, at the age of 26, Foujita’s first period of life in Paris began. There he interacted with Kawashima Riichirō, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and others. His admiration of antiquity can be seen in his copies of ancient Egyptian and Greek art, as well as his study of Greek dance. The various avant-garde artists of the day introduced him to Cubism and such trends. As a result he began to experiment with a painting style that differed from the depictive expression he had learned in Japan. When World War I broke out in July 1914 and many of his compatriots set off for home, he decided to remain in France. He then spent the long war years escaping to regional France, London, and other locales. He returned to Paris in early 1917 as the war situation calmed down, set up home in Montparnasse, and once again turned to art production. His marriage to the painter Fernande Barrey led to introductions to Parisian art dealers. In June 1917 he held his first solo show, and, indeed, that year marked Foujita’s real debut in Paris. When the war ended in 1918 the Paris art world fully reopened and he began producing more art. He received his first acceptance to the Salon d’Automne in 1919 and was elected a member of the Salon. In the early 1920s he began to focus on female nudes, outlined with thin black lines against his unique “milky white background” that he developed as a fusion of East-West painting methods, materials, and tools. After the mid 1920s he continued to participate in the Paris salons of the day, including the Salon d’Automne, Salon des indépendants, and Salon des Tuileries, producing such major works as his “Five Nudes” (1923, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) and “Before the Ball” (1925, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki). Amid the 1920s reopening of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange, the number of his Japan-related exhibitions and commissions rose. In 1924, while still resident in France, he submitted a work to the Imperial Fine Arts Academy Exhibition (Teiten) and became a member of the organization. Along with his renown in Paris, he started a relationship with Youki (Lucie Badoud) and with Youki as model he reached the pinnacle of his female nude expression through his images of her white skin. In the autumn of 1929, after sixteen years away, Foujita briefly returned to Japan, accompanied by Youki. They spent about three months in Japan which proved to be a triumphal return featuring solo exhibitions at Tokyo Asahi Shimbunsha and Nihombashi Mitsukoshi, giving lectures at his alma mater, holding displays in Osaka and Fukuoka, and publishing a succession of essays. At the beginning of 1930 they returned to Paris via North America, but in their absence, the Great Depression had hit the global economy, and the 1920s life of abundance had been shattered. During this period Foujita had the chance to hold solo shows in New York and Chicago. At the end of 1931, Foujita separated from Youki and left Paris, setting off for Central and South America with Madeleine Lequeux. They traveled through Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Cuba, before spending more than six months in Mexico. Foujita continued to paint during the journey and held a succession of solo shows as he pursued an itinerant artist lifestyle. Then in 1933 Foujita took Madeleine with him to Japan, traveling via the American West Coast. The following year Foujita became a member of the Nikakai (Nika Association) (until 1941), and began to look like settling in Japan, building a house while using Tokyo as his base for trips around Japan and to the Asian Continent. In 1936 Madeleine suddenly died, and Foujita moved in with Horiuchi Kimiyo. Until the Sino-Japanese War broke out in the summer of 1937, Foujita focused on creating murals, decorative bookbinding, and other projects as Mr. Foujita who had returned from Paris. In 1938 he became an advisor to the Kyūshitsukai (Ninth Room Society) which formed within the Nika Association, and his interactions with Yoshihara Jirō, which predates that role, are particularly noteworthy. In April 1939 he returned to France, but World War II had broken out, so he returned to Japan in July 1940. After the Sino-Japanese War broke out Foujita had been dispatched as a war artist to mainland China and Southeast Asia and he focused on the production of the Army’s commission for “war record paintings” based on his on-site sketches. However, rather than the usual war artist role of depicting Pacific War battle victories, following the Battle of Midway he produced a series of paintings that depict the defeat of the Japanese military, from “Final Fighting on Attu” (1943, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, on permanent loan from the United States Government) to “Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End” (1945, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, on permanent loan from the United States Government). These works had a massive influence on Japanese society and later generations of painters, and Foujita himself stated that they greatly changed the course of his own life. After the war ended he tried to return to France as quickly as possible, but it was impossible to get passage overseas from Occupied Japan, and he became all the more troubled by his own heightened sense of “responsibility for the war.” On March 10, 1949, at the age of 62 he flew out of Japan, never to return. After spending about a year in the United States, particularly New York City, he arrived in Montparnasse, Paris in February 1950. Until the mid-1960s he exhibited in the Les Peintres Témoins de Leur Temps Exhibition and held solo shows throughout Europe, primarily at the Galerie Paul Pétridès in Paris. He also published a succession of decorated books. In his personal life, in February 1955 Foujita and his wife Kimiyo renounced their Japanese citizenship and became French citizens. In October 1959 he was baptized a Catholic at Reims Cathedral in northern France. For his baptismal name he chose Léonard, from the name of his greatly revered Leonardo da Vinci. In the autumn of 1961 he moved to Villiers-le-Bâcle, Essonne Prefecture, on the outskirts of Paris. He renovated an old farm house and spent his final years in the combined residence and studio. From then on his art production centered on religious paintings, and he created the plans, murals and stained glass production for the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in Reims, which was completed in the autumn of 1966. On January 29, 1968 (Shōwa 43), he died in hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. He was 81 years old. Foujita spent most of his life outside his homeland, primarily in France, and he chose to be buried there. The selection of his burial site went through a varied process, but he later was re-interred in the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in Reims. In addition to painting, Foujita’s artistic interest spanned a gamut of interior decoration paintings, book binding, prints, photographs, textiles, ceramics, and woodwork. He was also a prolific writer, publishing during his lifetime “Profile (Pari no Yokogao)” (1929, Jitsugyō no Nihonsha), “Un Bras” [Bura ippon] (1936, Tōhō Bijutsu Kyōkai), and “Zuihitsushū Chi o Oyogu” (1942, Shomotsu Tenbōsha). These books by a rare Japanese who had experienced the culturally rich between-the-wars period in other lands were widely read in Japan. After his death a period of confusion reigned. Questions of forgeries lodged by his heirs, and a series of copyright lawsuits meant that it was a difficult period to study or publish about Foujita, or plan exhibitions. The major turning point occurred in 1988 when the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum held the first full retrospective, “Léonard Foujita,” which, did not, however, include the major works of the 1940s, his war record paintings. It was not until 2006 when the “Léonard Foujita” exhibition commemorating the 120th anniversary of his birth was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and other venues that an exhibition surveying his entire oeuvre, including the war pictures, was realized. Then around the time that his widow Kimiyo died in 2009, the works and materials (diaries, photo albums, etc.) that remained in her hands were donated to the Tokyo University of the Arts, contributing greatly to the study of this artist. Foujita’s final home in France was opened to the public in 2000 as the Maison-Atelier Foujita (Foujita House-Workshop). Study on the artist and his works in France centers largely on this institution. A major retrospective commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death was held in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Paris in 2018–2019, and it served as a great compendium of the dramatic advances made in the past two decades of research on his works and archives. In tandem, major strides have been made in the study of Foujita’s techniques. Restoration of individual works has provided excellent opportunities for technical study, and the data and results from those studies have been shared among conservators and scholars. Topics that remain for future study include the question of how Foujita’s activities in between-the-wars Paris compared to those of other Asian artists, particularly Japanese immigrants to North America. (Hayashi Yoko / Translated by Martha J. McClintock) (Published online: 2024-03-19)