T his autumn in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s will present The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection, a tightly curated selection of paintings and works on paper by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita to be offered at auction this September.

Among the ambitious Asian artists who travelled to France in the early 20th century, Foujita was one of the few who chose to remain in Paris, establishing himself as a leading figure of the École de Paris alongside contemporaries such as Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Spending much of his life in a foreign land, he cultivated a dynamic dialogue between his Japanese heritage and the Western artistic canon. Drawing upon European forms, techniques and subject matter to expand his artistic vocabulary, he simultaneously infused Western art with a distinctly Japanese sensibility, reimagining its traditions through his own lens. This creative alchemy—expressed through his poetic portrayals of people and intimate scenes of everyday life—ultimately forged a singular visual language that left an enduring mark on 20th-century art.

Marking the 140th anniversary of Foujita's birth, The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection will be on public view from 22–28 September in a specially designed exhibition at Sotheby’s Maison, Hong Kong. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience this exceptional group of works, tracing both the artist's geographical journey across Asia, Europe and South America and his profound spiritual evolution—from an ambitious young painter seeking recognition to a deeply reflective advocate for peace.

Foujita's continually evolving style stands as a testament not only to his remarkable artistic versatility but, above all, to his enduring pursuit of beauty and humanity—a legacy that has secured his place as one of the defining international masters of modern art.

By Sylvie Buisson, art historian, Foujita biographer, and author of the Catalogue Général Raisonné of the artist, in four volumes, since 1987.

T he passion for collecting Foujita that he inspires is nothing new. It goes back more than a hundred years.

Foujita was then young, unknown and bohemian, when he took Paris by storm.

He had arrived from Japan four years earlier and settled in the Montparnasse district when, in the spring of 1917, in the midst of war, everything began.

His lover, herself a painter, had begged him to reveal his work to her. It was a challenge she was issuing, for he was known only for working in secret. No one had yet seen what he had been doing since 1913. He had even refused to show anything to his closest friends, Soutine, Modigliani and Picasso. He felt that his work was so different. He was afraid of displaying his difference as a painter.

Yet he was ambitious. He wanted to succeed, and to prove to his father, General Tsuguakira Foujita of the Imperial Japanese Army, that he had been right to choose France over Japan in order to establish his career. The thought of displeasing his father paralysed him.

In the end, he took the plunge. He revealed himself to his lover, Fernande Barrey, who would soon, quite legitimately, become his first French wife. She cried out that he was a genius when she saw his wonderful works! She then took them from him and entrusted them to Georges Chéron, who, with the support of François Coty, a passionate art lover, patron and collector, hastened to organize Foujita’s first solo exhibition at his gallery at 56 rue La Boétie.

Even in the midst of war, it was a triumph. Picasso remained there for three hours, observing everything. Even more unexpected was the eagerness of major international collectors, who vied with one another to acquire the Foujita phenomenon. On the very first evening, everything had been sold. One hundred and ten works flew off the walls within a few hours, destined for the homes of some of the greatest collectors in France and around the world.

The Swiss lawyer Henri Seeholzer was the principal buyer. He was known for his connections with the French artistic and intellectual world of the interwar years. The others are gradually emerging as time goes by. Thanks to all of them, Foujita’s career was launched.

As Switzerland’s ambassador to the Vatican, Seeholzer, who had become a friend of the artist, later introduced him to the Pope after presenting him with a Madonna on a gold background. In 1920, Foujita was thus able to approach the Raphaels, Botticellis and Michelangelos of the Vatican, alone and at his leisure.

“With him, you enter the realm of reason, of the normal, the wise. Then, without knowing when or how, he sets a secret spring in motion, and while you still believe yourself to be in reality, you are already with him in the realm of ideas, in the world of dreams; you only become aware of it when, subtly, he leads you back to the door of his closed garden. (…) No Foujita painting could ever leave one indifferent, if only because of the way he varies the execution of his original power of enchantment.”

Thus wrote P. Guiboud-Ribaud in 1927.

To travel through Foujita’s work is indeed to embark upon an enchanting and wondrous country resembling Cythera. To travel through Foujita is also to leave one’s baggage behind on the shore of the commonplace and enter a world of difference, on the other side of the looking glass, where only animals speak to man, where children resemble Alice in Wonderland, and melancholy women dream of writing poems; a world where line and colour come together with the delicacy of the gesture of a master of the tea ceremony.

It is in this universe, created by Foujita from scratch, that he placed himself halfway between East and West. There, following the ever-renewed whims of his imagination, his soul beaded with the same dew that, in the morning, bathes the maple leaves in Japan and the plane trees in France, he invented his own reality—and the passion for collecting him took root.

From Princess Murat, Marie de Rohan-Chabot, wife of Prince Lucien Murat in 1920s Paris, to Joe Lewis, a discreet, visionary and major collector, and to the great Japanese private collections that have given rise to important museums over the past fifty years, there is but one common thread: a passion for art and for the men and women who create it, together with the desire to share that passion and keep it alive.

With Foujita, collectors seek the subtlety of his pared-down compositions; they cannot help but share his tenderness for cats, his intimate nudes against ivory backgrounds, or his portraits of children lost in their dreams. They understand the significance of the different periods of his nomadic life: the Roaring Twenties in Montparnasse, his exile, and his return to France.

A selection of very fine works from the Lewis Collection was exceptionally lent for the major Foujita exhibition held at the Musée Maillol in Paris on the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death.

As curator of that exhibition, and as the author, together with my son Casimir, of Foujita’s Catalogue Raisonné, I would like here to renew my admiration for Vivian and her father for their generosity, which reflects an especially noble conception of the collector’s role.