LÉONARD TSUGUHARU FOUJITA

(1886-1968)

Nu allongé

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Sylvie Buisson.

Provenance
Private collection, Argentina (acquired directly from the artist).
Galerie Nichido, Japan (acquired from the above, through Galería Jorge Mara and Galería Bontempo in November 1989).
Private collection, Japan (acquired from the above in 2011).

Literature
S. Buisson, T.L. Foujita, Inédits, Paris, 2007, no. C.32.183.H (illustrated p. 23).

'[Foujita] represents one of those rare cases... of an artist of non-European race and essence, who has succeeded in becoming important from within the European conception of art... His sharp lines, the vast, blank surfaces, the true synthesis in its representation of theme, the relative coolness, or placidity of expression. All of those elements of his art, finally, leave me in a state of amazement.'
- Mario de Andrade, the Brazilian modernist poet and critic, reviewing Foujita's gallery exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, the first stop along his South American tour. Díario Nacional, 20 January 1932.

In 1931, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita embarked on a world tour that would profoundly shift the narratives of his life and art. The close of the Roaring Twenties saw not just the devastating break of his third marriage to Lucie Badoul ('Youki'), but also the first stages of the Great Depression. Dodging the French government's pursuit of exorbitant taxes he had hitherto evaded, Foujita reached an impasse. He fled Paris with his new lover, a beautiful and charismatic young model named Madeleine Lequeux. A member of the thriving bohemian scene of Montparnasse, Madeleine was a hostess at Le Sphinx by day and a performer at the Casino de Paris by night. She is instantly recognisable throughout Foujita's early 1930s oeuvre from her handsome features: golden red hair, piercing blue eyes, a regal nose and a strong, elegant chin. These traits identify her as the resplendent subject of the present work, Nu allongé.

The 'Flight of Fou Fou', as the pair's dramatic departure became known, brought them first to Brazil, then to Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Cuba, Mexico and the United States. Their tour was embellished with all the hallmarks of celebrity – press conferences, dinners with dignitaries, wildly successful solo exhibitions, and large spreads in national newspapers harking the arrival of the 'Foujita phenomenon'. Dancing under the dazzling lights of the Copacabana Grand Ball, the couple turned heads. Foujita cut an arresting figure with his pudding bowl haircut, Chaplin moustache, horn-rimmed spectacles and fashionable suit. Madeleine donned a glamorous, low-cut gown matched only by her vivacious spirit. Foujita worked fervently throughout the journey, as the fame he had garnered in Paris spread swiftly across the globe. His work took on a more dramatic air, as he introduced into his compositions exaggerated poses inspired by the cinema. He frequently captured the idle and intimate moments punctuating their taxing travels, with Madeleine stretching out into languorous poses. The present work is the most mesmerising of that series.

A symphony of serene lines and delicate silk, Madeleine lounges, her body directly confronting the viewer while her face turns away, cold and mysterious. The soft ripples of the backdrop and diaphanous sheets flow into the waves of her auburn hair and the dips and curves of her supple form. Madeleine's very substance merges with her surroundings, their subtle gradients of pink, sepia and white in pure harmony with her alabaster skin, opal-coloured eyes and rose quartz lips. A figment of fantasy, her ideally proportioned figure emerges like a human tapestry, the perfect semi-circles of her breasts traced with a compass-like exactitude. A virtuoso trained in the Japanese arts of calligraphy and Nihonga painting, Foujita elucidates her curves with a deft, undulating outline, encased within a halo-like aura of white mineral paint – a technique solely of Foujita's creation. A visual haiku, the present work takes its power and essence from its measurement and simplicity. The entire effect is of a shrine to Madeleine – a gesture of utmost devotion to beauty incarnate.

Foujita's eclectic materials and methods are key in his achievement of this unparalleled aesthetic. To invoke his sinuous half-tones and shading, he would stroke the picture plane with a cotton ball loaded with charcoal power, a method related to his estompe drawing technique. Foujita's pale mineral paint seeps directly into the silk, purposefully revealing the fineness of the material and each of its perfectly calibrated threads. The resulting sfumato ('haziness') – an aesthetic extracted from the Italian Renaissance painters Foujita revered – stands in contrast to the impasto layering of vibrant oil paints favoured by his French contemporaries. In paradoxical departure from European influences, he applies sumi-e ink in razor-thin lines with a menso, the thinnest brush in the Japanese painter's repertoire. All of this is finished with Foujita's grand fond blanc: his magical, secret glaze. Likely an emulsion of crushed chalk, white lead, talc, magnesium silicate and flaxseed oil, the glaze conjures up Foujita's nyuhakushoku or 'milky white' effect, its mesmerising quality causing Foujita's 1920s and early 1930s works to be his most sought-after. The present work's spectacle of pearly iridescence and soft grey shading achieves a dual effect: Madeleine exhibits at once the gravitas of a Michelangelo sculpture and the flat, smooth texture of Japanese lacquerware designs.

Foujita's confluence of Western chiaroscuro and precise Japanese painting techniques echoes the innovations of Modern Japanese Nihonga painters, such as Yokoyama Taikan, whose monumental silk scroll Metempsychosis graces the permanent collection of Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art. Nihonga employs traditional Japanese methods – namely the application of ink and mineral paint onto paper or silk – together with elements of Yōga (European-style painting), particularly shading and perspective. Nihonga artists derive pigments from minerals and other organic materials, such as shells, corals and semi-precious stones. Foujita's use of mineral paint in the present work adopts Nihonga to achieve his authentic vision of the grand nu, a distinctly European genre. These intercultural experiments are hallmarks of the increasingly cosmopolitan outlook of Meiji-era Japan, a period of profound cultural change. At the time of Foujita's birth, Japan's identity was swiftly evolving from that of an isolated, feudal society into a modern, industrialised power open to foreign aesthetic, political, scientific and technological ideas.

The present work evidently had enormous personal significance to Foujita. His 1931 self-portrait in the National Museum of Fine Art, Argentina, displays a near replica of the present Madeleine's visage and décolletage. This painstaking repetition – down to the gentle curl of hair over her ear, and the taut muscles of her elegant neck – offers a rare glimpse into Foujita's method. The continual copying of one's own designs echoes the tendencies of the Japanese printmakers – such as Katsushika Hokusai – that Foujita was directly inspired by. The practice of drawing upon source sketches across multiple compositions was also fundamental to the Italian masters that Foujita idolised. By situating a mythologised version of himself against a work of such striking beauty, Foujita evokes the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Italian Renaissance art: that surrounding oneself with beauty imbues one with the spirit of the divine. The picture-within-a-picture of Madeleine is placed like a mirror, her face level to that of Foujita, both of whom are immortalised within the iconic trappings of his studio. Clearly, Foujita not only valued the present work as an ultimate emblem of beauty, but also his wife as a spiritual counterpart, a channel to all of his dreams and desires. Like the character Pygmalion of Ovid's Metamorphosis, Foujita had fallen headlong in love with his own artistic creation.

Madeleine's appearance in the 1931 self-portrait also suggests that Foujita worked on the present work's composition off and on throughout the South American journey. He likely completed it in Argentina in 1932, after which it was swiftly acquired by a private collector and remained for some 57 years. The pair received a particularly enthusiastic welcome in Buenos Aires, attracting sixty thousand visitors to Foujita's solo exhibition and selling all of his works. Foujita felt a particular affection for the capital, finding its artistic scene and city streets to be reminiscent of Paris in its halcyon days.

Foujita's fascination with the classical nude can be traced back to his years as a copyist at the Musée du Louvre, during which he became transfixed by the sumptuous oil paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and the raw beauty of classical sculpture. During his 1921 trip to Italy, Foujita was awed by the anatomical perfection and tumbling spectacle of Michelangelo's sculptures and frescoes. In Nu allongé, Foujita extracts their splayed postures, solid musculature and tightly posed hands and fingers. Through these visual allusions, Foujita took from his Italian idols the mantle of seeking a grand and pure form of beauty. Incidentally, Foujita was taken by the name Léonard – bestowed upon him by the Parisian avant-garde – as he was flattered by its parallel to Leonardo da Vinci. Foujita's friends, among them Derain, Léger, Modigliani and Picasso, selected the pseudonym due to difficulty pronouncing his birth-name Tsuguharu. In the dusk of his life, Foujita would formally adopt the name Léonard through the rite of baptism, a poetic addendum to his conversion to Catholicism. As such, Foujita would enter the canon of Western art history in the image of his heroes.

Reconciling his hybrid cultural identity, Foujita also incorporated the nineteenth century Orientalist tradition of the Odalisque into his nudes, taking his cue from Ingres. Visions of erotic sensuality, Odalisque paintings would place an anonymous mistress or prostitute within a naturalistically rendered setting implying an exotic location. Foujita's scenery, by contrast, is often minimal and dreamlike. In this regard, Thiébault Sisson has observed: 'It is the relief without shading of M. Ingres – with whom, indeed, Foujita seems to have as much in common as with his Japanese ancestors – a relief which is suggested, at least in its essentials, merely by the supple arabesques of the lines' (T. Sisson, Le Temps, 1 May 1923). In dialogue with Ingres, Foujita achieves a similar atmosphere of serenity and tranquillity punctuated by a powerful spark of lust. The two artists explore in tandem the intersections of 'East' and 'West', in complex concoctions of technique, imagery and mythology. Postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak have generated extensive discourse on the cultural ramifications of the Odalisque, while contemporary artists such as Yasumasa Morimura subvert the trope in order to re-empower marginalised groups.

Foujita's intense relationships with women made him a lifelong devotee to their artistic depiction. Having suffered the death of his mother at the age of five, the young Foujita enjoyed significant pampering and attention from his sister, her friends and the family's female servants, engendering within him a strong affinity with women. Throughout his life, each of his five wives would model for his nudes. Most of the resulting works are cropped suggestively, below the breasts, naval or pubic area. By contrast, the present work's full attention to the body marks it as a rare and significant grand nu. Indeed, Foujita's captivating Nu allongé is the culmination of his most peripatetic period, within which he achieved the apex of his fame and technical virtuosity. The peak of Foujita's lifelong quest for an ideal beauty, and a quintessential example of his unique concordance of East and West, Nu allongé is one of the most extraordinary nudes by Foujita to ever come to market.