Glory in a line : a life of Foujita-- the artist caught between East & West /

IT must have been unnerving to encounter the Japanese artist known as Foujita. Arriving in Marseilles in 1913, at the age of 26, he posed for a photographer wearing "a mauve frock coat and a white solar topee" - the proper headgear for "British colonialists in tropical lands," as Phyllis Birnbaum writes in "Glory in a Line," her engaging portrait of the artist as cultural chameleon. During the 1920s, at the height of his popularity in Paris, "Fou-Fou," as he was nicknamed by his French friends, attended a costume ball dressed only in a loincloth and carrying a cage on his back with a naked woman inside. The woman was his trash-talking second wife, Fernande. When asked by a polite reporter about her early life as an artist's model, she replied: "Model? I was a streetwalker!" With his trademark bangs, gold earrings and tortoiseshell glasses, Foujita cultivated his celebrity status. He compared his own self-marketing to a Citroën campaign: "There's nothing that beats the combination of ability and publicity." Born in Tokyo in 1886, Foujita was 13 when he told his father, a high-ranking military doctor, that he wanted to be an artist. The following year, one of his watercolors was chosen for a student exhibition at the World's Fair in Paris, "the beginning of everything," according to Foujita. In 1905, the year of Japan's victory in its war with Russia, he entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but he knew that international reputations were made in France. Foujita's Paris, with its grinding poverty and appalling sanitation, was more like Henry Miller's city of sex and squalor than Hemingway's more decorous moveable feast. Foujita joined the community of struggling émigré artists in Montparnasse, making close friends with the School of Paris painters Soutine and Modigliani, with whom he traveled to the South of France during the spring of 1918. Foujita was "the only clean, sober and financially secure member" of the party. He showed judo moves to Modigliani and taught Soutine to use a toothbrush. "This increased Soutine's popularity at the local whorehouse," Birnbaum observes. For all his flamboyant behavior, Foujita kept long hours in his studio. He developed a characteristic style by combining liberal use of his own white paint (he refused to divulge the secret recipe) and the "sumi" ink of traditional Japanese brush painting. He found a market for his pictures of white nudes accompanied by cats, a winning combination at least as old as Manet's "Olympia," and his hard work paid off in the "spectacular year" of 1921, when he was invited to join the jury of the annual salon and painted "My Room, Still Life With Alarm Clock," perhaps his most affecting work. An arrestingly white-on-white composition, "My Room" depicts a wooden table with a white doll, a basket of eggs and an alarm clock lying on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Three ceramic plates hang from the wall, and two wooden shoes, reminiscent of Van Gogh, lie on the floor. In front of the white clock face, with hands frowning at 3:40, are Foujita's tortoiseshell glasses. Birnbaum believes that Foujita "claims the French way of life for himself" in this painting, but it's also a moving self-portrait, conveying both domestic comfort and an air of isolation. Foujita's life in Paris collapsed abruptly: a tax scandal threatened his savings and the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos took his third wife, Youki. After a nomadic decade - with stops in Brazil, Mexico and Cuba - Foujita returned to Japan, where his resentment at perceived slights in the West metastasized into rabid nationalism. He raved against "Jewish gallery owners" and "strange international perverts" back in France. Foujita's penchant for flamboyant costumes and hard work served him well during the war years, when he gave his "right arm" to the emperor in a notorious series of theatrical paintings meant to inspire Japanese resolve. Was Foujita a war criminal or a closet pacifist? Did his pictures portray the glory or the horror of war? Birnbaum weighs the evidence on both sides, interviewing his surviving friends and enemies. Maybe Foujita, with his equivocal English, summed it up best: "I am not Tojo - yes? I am Foujita - no?" Foujita spent his final years holed up with his fifth wife in a village in rural France. He converted to Roman Catholicism and, immodest to the end, took as his baptismal name "Léonard," as in da Vinci. He died in 1968, when his work was again popular with collectors, although his reputation diminished sharply thereafter. The details of Foujita's fascinating life left me wishing for more: more on his summer with Modigliani, more on his friendship with Desnos, more on his sojourn in Cuba. "His life story will always be a riddle," Birnbaum writes in this brisk and stylishly written book, but she has only begun the process of solving it. Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and writes about art for Slate.

So distinctive was his appearance, so flamboyant his pranks, and so popular his paintings of women and cats, Foujita was a Jazz Age superstar. Born in Tokyo in 1886, Foujita arrived in Paris in 1913 and soon forged an alluring style that combined Western settings with Japanese traditions to create, as Birnbaum so vividly attests, works distinguished by extraordinarily nuanced whites and breathtakingly supple and precise lines. Yet for all his success, the fastidious, disciplined Foujita was destined to arouse controversy. Birnbaum, whose earlier works focus on Japanese women, judiciously teases apart the many contradictions and mysteries enfolded in Foujita's dramatic life, chronicling his rise to fame, five marriages, return to Japan in the 1930s, and surprising metamorphosis into his at-war homeland's foremost military artist. With access to newly available materials and expertise in all things Japanese, Birnbaum tracks Foujita's ups and downs with compassion, humor, and discernment, exhibiting particular sensitivity in her analysis of the strange exhilaration Foujita experienced while making official war paintings so overwhelming people prayed before them and his despair at being viewed as a war criminal. Birnbaum's compelling biography reveals the shadow side of artistic compulsion. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist

Birnbaum (Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo) tackles the perplexing story of Fujita Tsuguharu, known as Foujita, the eccentric and controversial Japanese painter who achieved success in the West during the early decades of the 20th century. Born in 1886, Foujita studied art in Japan, but at the age of 27 moved to Paris, where he gained fame for his paintings-especially exotic cats and female nudes rendered in exquisite black lines against white backgrounds-combining Eastern and Western artistic traditions. He was equally well known for his wild behavior and flamboyant dress. But in 1940, inexplicably, he moved back to Japan and produced art works promoting its military ambitions, for which he was reviled after the war by his countrymen. Claiming he was being persecuted by the Japanese, he returned to the West in 1949 and managed to salvage his reputation before he died in France in 1968. Basing her biography on letters, archival material and interviews with people who knew Foujita, Birnbaum presents an engrossing account of his life but is unable to shed much light on his reversals of allegiance. The result is an incomplete picture of this inscrutable artist. 24 pages of b&w illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Carefully considered, well-balanced biography of the controversial Japanese artist who created a stir in modernist Paris and was later vilified for his pro-fascist war paintings. On the one hand, Foujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) had fabulous success as a painter of cats and nudes in France from the early 1900s until World War II; on the other, he zealously led the group of artists hired by Japan's war ministry in the late '30s to sell Japanese aggression into China and beyond. Birnbaum (Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, 1999) clearly prefers to emphasize the first half of Foujita's life: The son of a high-ranking military doctor in Tokyo, he learned Western-style painting in art school and, like many of his peers, yearned to escape "from the traditional Japanese terrors of earthquakes, thunder, fire, and fathers." He immigrated to Paris in 1913, mixing freely with a bohemian crowd that included Bonnard and Modigliani with the help of some exotic, self-sewn Greek costumes and a series of useful French lady friends who didn't know or didn't care about his wife back in Japan. (The author admits she often finds the women in Foujita's life more compelling than her subject.) Second wife Fernande Barrey helped secure his first show, and wealthy customers were quite taken by his unique line (gleaned from the ukiyo-e tradition) and incomparable white paint. Foujita's eventual return to Japanese ways complicated his reputation. He exhorted Japanese artists to resist Western imitation and be true to their culture, yet was castigated by his compatriots as an insincere opportunist. By the late '30s, married to the Japanese Kimiyo, he "transformed himself into an earnest representative of the state just as easily as he had changed coffee shops." Birnbaum offers fascinating testimony by those who knew Foujita, both fans and adversaries, and she sifts through the evidence to depict a conflicted artist proud of Japanese culture and stung by Western racism who ended up mistrusted by all sides. Readers can make up their own minds with the help of this evenhanded portrait. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.