Tsugouharu Foujita

Galeria Renart, Barcelona
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner circa mid-1950s

Barcelona, Pinacoteca, Foujita, 1953

The canvas is not lined and UV examination reveals no evidence of retouching. Apart from a barely visible diagonal scratch to the lower part of the upper left quadrant, this work is in overall very good condition. Colours: fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though overall slightly warmer in the original.
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The present work is testament to some of the major preoccupations of Tsuguharu Foujita's mature period. In discussing this period and the artist's focus on the female model in medieval dress, Robert Rey talks of how 'in Asia, every childhood is sacred [...] it is by instinct that Foujita transforms the children of France into fairies. Consider what becomes of Cosette from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, a book the artist perhaps never read [...] a little girl unburdened by the slightest misery' (quoted in Sylvie Buisson, Foujita et ses amis du Montparnasse, Paris, 2010, p. 134). Foujita's paintings from this period increasingly combined religious or historical imagery with a remarkable sensibility for feminine expression to create images subtly laden with suggestion and strong visual impact. As Sylvie Buisson explains, 'the boundaries between the sacred and the profane became confused' (ibid.).

In the present work, Foujita's elegant young girl is meditative and immutable, her large eyes fixed and blank. Her gaze and form are nevertheless delicately charged with an interior intensity as she solemnly holds her paintbrush, mirroring the pose of her self-portrait visible in the background. The artist's modernity and originality reside in precisely this fusion of the formal training of his Japanese heritage, the finesse of his monochromatic lines, with the reinterpreted iconography and luminous palette of his adoptive country.