

Robert Rey notes, "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 Vicor 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). 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.