Tsuguharu Foujita (Born 1886) was born in Tokyo, Japan. He died in 1968 in Zürich, Switzerland at the age of 81. He was a Japanese painter best known for his participation in the 1910s’ bohemian culture. His representational yet strange paintings often depict cats, women or himself. He found an instant success in Paris and, even though he had no connections beforehand. He was able to sell and live off his art. Foujita studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. After his graduation he moved to Paris, where he met and became friends with well-known forward-thinking artists of the day like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Chaïm Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani.
His work can now be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. Tsuguharu applied French oil techniques to Japanese-style paintings. He became a member of the School of Paris. This was a group of high-profile artists who resided in the Montparnasse district of that city. While in Paris, Fujita exhibited his works for the first time in 1917. The piece of art that he exhibited was a nude portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse (a model) set against an ivory that he showed at the Salon d’Automne in 1922. His is distinguished by the strong evocative line that stemmed from his art training in Japan. Currently, his art is in many galleries across the globe.
