Word: foujita
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bangs & Tangos. "The year 1913," a French critic once wrote, "was distinguished by the arrival in Paris of Foujita and the tango." For a while they were almost equal sensations. An ambitious art student who had thrice been refused admission to the Tokyo Salon, Foujita rightly reasoned that his black bangs, Harold Lloyd glasses and whisker-fine brush drawings would please Parisians more than they did his fellow Japanese. He came to know Montmartre better than he had Fujiyama, strolled its steep streets in a leopard-skin hat, followed by a brace of tabbies on a leash...
Society swells and bohemians alike flocked to Foujita's exhibitions. Utrillo and Modigliani swept him off on their absinthe binges, though he himself never touched a drop. Matisse dropped around to ask how he made his lines so thin and firm (he does it by holding the brush vertically, in the Chinese way, and drawing from the shoulder instead of the wrist), and solemnly assured him that had he been born in Europe his name would have been Picasso. The Lucky Strike people asked Foujita for a testimonial; his response (for use in Paris newspapers): "Women like to kiss...
...Foujita abruptly turned his back on all that and took off for Tokyo; he was afraid the Germans would bomb Paris. When the Pacific war came he was conscripted to paint combat pictures at $33.76 a month. Among the most popular was Raid on Pearl Harbor, done from an aerial photograph. He was bombed out of his Tokyo studio; his black bangs turned to silver. At war's end he shipped a show to Manhattan (TIME, Sept. 8, 1947) to raise money for a trip...
Ladies & Animals. The 20 paintings in Foujita's new show had all been done in the past eight months. The most memorable of them were snowy idealizations of naked ladies lying down and animal pictures that brought Arthur Rackham and the fables of La Fontaine to mind. He had been inspired to start both series, said Foujita, by a dream in which animals in human dress had mingled with humans in nothing...
...Foujita used no models for any of his new pictures. His silvery nudes belonged "to no nationality, no epoch. I have had 3,000 models and I don't need them any more." He had imparted an oriental delicacy to such details as the hair and toes, but generally slurred over the major elements that better draftsmen are apt to emphasize: the thrust of a knee or elbow, the twist of a torso or the solid bulge of a thigh. Shining out against deep black backgrounds, his nudes had more flow than form...