Tsuguharu Foujita
Brought a Japanese brush to Montparnasse and painted the whitest nudes in Paris.
Tsuguharu Foujita was born in Tokyo in 1886 and arrived in Paris in 1913, where he became one of the few Japanese artists at the centre of the Ecole de Paris, known as much for his bowl haircut and round glasses as for the pictures. His achievement was technical: a ground of extraordinary smooth white on which he drew with a fine Japanese brush in sumi ink, giving nudes and cats a line no European painter could match. He returned to Japan and painted war pictures for the Imperial Army, a period that damaged his standing at home, then came back to France, converted to Catholicism as Leonard, and died in 1968.
This is a market driven principally from Japan, and the Paris years of the 1920s are far ahead of everything else. Foujita is extensively forged, and the composition of that white ground is one of the technical grounds on which genuine works are distinguished, so scientific examination is common at the upper end. Cats and nudes are the subjects that lead. Alongside paintings there is a substantial output of drawings, watercolours, illustrated books and etchings, much of it from the 1920s, and these are widely copied as well.
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