Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita: An Extraordinary Life in Art

L éonard Tsuguharu Foujita landed in Paris in 1913, on the eve of the First World War.

Born in 1886 in Tokyo, as an adolescent Foujita had already resolved firstly to become a painter, and secondly to study in France, the avant-garde centre of the art world. Foujita’s father was an army medical director who persuaded his precocious son to pursue his fine art studies in Japan. Foujita dutifully graduated in 1910 from what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied courses on nihonga (Japanese-style painting) as well as under Seiki Kuroda, an exponent of yōga (Western-style painting).

But impatient for more, Foujita finally moved to Paris in 1913 at the age of 27. His father offered him a three-year annuity, on the understanding that Foujita would return to Japan by the age of 30, a plan soon derailed by the outbreak of war. He settled in Montparnasse, quickly becoming part of the brilliant and eclectic École de Paris that included peers Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.

From the beginning of his stay in Paris, Foujita took advantage of his proximity to the Louvre (which remained open during the war until two shells exploded in its gardens in 1918) to study the works of Old Masters such as Raphael, Rembrandt, and Leonardo da Vinci. From 1917, Foujita produced a series of highly stylised portraits, often in profile, that drew on Renaissance portraiture as much as Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

Foujita’s signature linear style, an ultra-fine, quasi-calligraphic ink line which favoured delicate two-dimensional elegance over heavy modelling, distinguished him from peers such as Modigliani whose parallel fascination was with elongated, Mannerist visages and limbs characterised by bold and heavy-handed brushwork.

I n 1923, Foujita wrote excitedly to a friend that he had fallen head over heels for "a lovely, lovely beauty of almost twenty, and she also loves me.” The object of his affections, Lucie Badoud, possessed lustrous copper-toned hair and skin so enchantingly white that he re-christened her “Youki,” the Japanese word for “snow.” That same year, Foujita’s paintings attracted critical acclaim at the celebrated Salon d’Automne. A decade after moving to Paris, Foujita had officially arrived.

Youki inspired Foujita to new heights. “In order to give form to my fine lines, I needed a smoother and more lustrous canvas,” noted Foujita. He developed his trademark grand fond blanc—a secret blend of flaxseed oil, crushed chalk (or white lead) and magnesium silicate—that simulated radiant ivory flesh in his sensational nude portraits of Youki and other female muses.

By the mid-1920s “Fou-Fou,” as he was nicknamed by his French friends, was so well-known in Paris that department store windows were dressed with mannequins bearing his trademark bangs, gold hooped earrings and round tortoiseshell glasses.

A s Foujita rode the waves of public popularity, his private life was marred by a number of personal and financial entanglements. After marrying his muse Youki in 1929, he was subjected to demands from the French tax authorities for unpaid taxes dating from 1925. He left for Japan with Youki, where he had a series of major exhibitions lined up in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. Foujita was, however, met with an ambivalent reception from Japanese critics, and he returned to Paris in 1930. Under financial strain, Foujita moved into shared accommodation with the French poet Robert Desnos, but was devastated when his beloved Youki subsequently embarked upon a relationship with Desnos.

Compounded by severe financial and romantic distress, Foujita left Paris and embarked upon an extensive journey through Latin America in late 1931 and 1932 with his new partner, Madeleine Lequeux, a dancer at the Casino de Paris nicknamed “the panther.” Foujita’s final stop was Mexico in late 1932, where he and Madeleine stayed seven months.

After his travels in Latin America, Foujita returned to Japan in 1933, where (barring a brief return to Paris in 1939) he stayed until after the Second World War ended. In 1949 he departed for New York. It was a period of intense creativity: over the course of ten months he held exhibitions announcing his postwar comeback and taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, before relocating back to France in early 1950, never to live in Japan again.

D elighted to be back, Foujita declared his intention never to leave Paris again. His works paid homage to his beloved city: he began painting a series of “Paris landscapes,” and by 1952 his style had taken on a nostalgic, dreamlike realism in the European classical tradition.

Alongside him was Kimiyo Horiuchi, whom he had met in Tokyo in the mid-1930s, and who had become his constant companion throughout the turbulent war years. Providing the artist with a sense of stability and quiet devotion after decades of restless travel and heartbreak, she remained the primary anchor of his mature life. Foujita and Kimiyo married in 1954, gained French nationality in 1955 and subsequently renounced their Japanese nationality.

Abandoning the provocative nudes of his 1920s Montparnasse heyday, Foujita’s mind turned towards comforting, intimate depictions of maternités and young children, aided by his collection of porcelain dolls which he posed in the arms of his little subjects. Children became his primary subject, bridging the linear precision of nihonga painting, European folk realism and Northern Renaissance portraiture.

The late 1950s and 1960s marked a profound personal and spiritual transformation for Foujita. The couple converted to Catholicism and were baptised in Reims Cathedral in 1959, with Foujita taking the Christian name Léonard. Now in his seventies, having retreated from the bustling Parisian nightlife of his youth to the quiet French countryside of Villiers-le-Bâcle in 1961, Foujita’s late work shifted towards contemplative, sacred subjects.

Just a few years later, Foujita was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away on 29 January 1968 in Zürich, Switzerland, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy.