Tsuguharu Fujita1886~1968 藤田嗣治

Fujita Tsuguharu (Léonard Foujita) was a Japanese-born French painter and sculptor who gained international fame in the first half of the 20th century, born into a doctor’s family in Ushigome (now Shinjuku), Tokyo. He moved to France in 1913 and settled in Montparnasse, where he mingled with painters of the École de Paris such as Picasso and Modigliani, and astonished the Western art world with his nudes rendered in a uniquely “milky white” skin tone achieved by applying Japanese sumi line work and menso brush technique to oil painting. With cats and women as his favored subjects, his refined linework and decorative sensibility made him one of the darlings of postwar Paris in the 1920s. After being criticized for his many wartime propaganda paintings during World War II, he left Japan in 1949, returned to Paris, and acquired French nationality in 1955. In 1959 he was baptized as a Catholic at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims, taking the name Léonard Foujita, and he died in Zurich in 1968.