Word: foujita
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...from challenging artistic fundamentals, but they still had no time for bourgeois morality. A room devoted to nudes painted between the wars is frankly erotic, including the Italian Amedeo Modigliani's lush Reclining Nude of 1919. Less familiar are the delicate Youki, Snow Goddess (1924), by the Japanese Tsuguharu Foujita, who lies against frozen whiteness protected by an alert and sharp-featured dog, and Marcel Gromaire's Seated Nude (1929), sporting fashionable bobbed hair and a wide-collared coat slung around her shoulders...
Died. Tsougouharu Foujita, 81, Japanese-born painter who settled in France; of cancer; in Zurich. An eccentric off canvas as well as on, Foujita reached Paris in 1913 in purple morning coat and pith helmet, went on to hobnob with the brilliant and the bizarre in the Montmartre of the '20s. He painted cats by the thousands and almost as many catlike women, achieving the first real fusion of Oriental brushwork and Western oils. He topped off his career in 1966 with a set of giant frescoes for a specially built chapel near Rheims, hoping cheerfully to "atone...
...Foujita is still painting. Last week he joined that select group, with Matisse, Jean Cocteau and Le Corbusier, who have created their own chapels. He was baptized only seven years ago (he took the name Leonard in honor of Da Vinci), and with age he decided, "It is time to think about a spiritual legacy." He convinced the director of the Mumm champagne firm to put up $300,000 to build and landscape the chapel above their wine caves near Reims. Foujita did 1,076 sq. ft. of frescoes inside the 47-ft.-long chapel, including a side chapel honoring...
...built this chapel to atone for 80 years of sins," says Foujita. He certainly gave himself opportunities to accumulate them. Descendant of a warlike samurai family, the Foujiwara (meaning "wild fields of wisteria"), the painter hobnobbed with Picasso, Apollinaire, Isadora Duncan and the catlike artists' model Kiki. Alexander Calder once exhibited his miniature circus at Foujita's soirees...
When World War II broke out in Europe, Foujita fled back to Japan only to find more of it. There he did military paintings from photographs. After Japan's defeat, his samurai cousins, a marshal and a count, were held to be war criminals; but the artist was found blameless, and he rushed back to Paris. He is still exuberant, worked ten hours a day on his Reims chapel for the champagne growers. But he did not indulge in their product. Says he dryly: "I never touch a drop of alcohol...