Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita was a pivotal figure of inter-war Paris, renowned for his extraordinary fusion of Western oil painting techniques with traditional Japanese printmaking and ink practices. Born in Tokyo in 1886, he studied Western-style painting (yōga) at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts before moving to Paris in 1913 and joining the avant-garde alongside Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Pablo Picasso.

By the 1920s, Foujita had achieved widespread acclaim for applying delicate sumi ink lines with fine Japanese brushes directly onto canvas. His nudes, self-portraits and cat studies were notable for their 'milky-white' glazes (grand fond blanc), which Foujita achieved through a closely guarded recipe of chalk, flaxseed oil and magnesium silicate. French critic Henri Focillon dubbed him 'the Utamaro of Montparnasse' for mirroring Kitagawa Utamaro's delicate bijin-ga outlines, while contemporaries drew frequent parallels to Katsushika Hokusai, citing their shared draughtsmanship and lifelong fascination with domestic cats.

Throughout his career, Foujita navigated complex identities between East and West. After serving as an official war artist in Japan during World War II, he returned permanently to France in 1950, acquiring French citizenship in 1955. In 1959, he converted to Catholicism, taking the baptismal name Léonard in homage to Leonardo da Vinci. His late career culminated in monumental religious commissions, most notably the frescoes for the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix (the Foujita Chapel) in Reims.

Foujita's legacy has been celebrated in major retrospectives hosted by the Musée Maillol in Paris (2018), the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2018) and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. Today, his work is held in prestigious public institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.