“Memorandum on Leonard Tsuguharu Fujita: A Walk with Léonard Fujita”

2021/01/13

In 2004, after finishing a 42-year career as a company employee, I transferred as a third-year student into the Faculty of Letters, majoring in Aesthetics and Science of Arts at the age of 66, fulfilling a long-held wish. I did this because I believed that to conduct full-scale research on my maternal great-uncle, Léonard Fujita, it would be beneficial to have a foundational knowledge of aesthetics and art history.

Fujita, whom I affectionately called "Bancho Jiiji" (Grandpa Bancho) in my childhood, had his studio in Rokubancho, Kojimachi at the time. When I entered elementary school, despite the shortage of art supplies due to the intensification of the Pacific War, he gave me a wooden box of 55 professional-grade oil pastels as a gift to celebrate my enrollment. This became an unforgettable memory for me, and after Fujita left Japan after the war and passed away in France, I eventually felt a desire to properly research him.

On the other hand, there are now almost no people left who had direct contact with Fujita and knew his personality or the events that occurred around him. Therefore, as part of the last generation to have known Fujita during his lifetime, I began to feel that it was my mission to record a "memorandum" about him and leave it for future researchers. Once I returned to being a student and began full-scale research on Fujita, relatives and others began sending me primary materials such as reminiscences, diaries, memoirs, letters, and photographs related to him.

Then, in 2016, the diaries and photographs bequeathed by Fujita's widow, Kimiyo, to the Tokyo University of the Arts University Art Museum were made public. The materials I had collected up to that point also served to complement the materials bequeathed to the museum. This "memorandum" is a compilation of these various threads. Consequently, this book is not a specialized academic work on Fujita's art. Based on the primary materials collected so far, it is an omnibus-style record of fragments of Fujita's life, adhering as closely as possible to the facts as they were.

Through these previously untold episodes, I hope to provide even a small glimpse into Fujita's way of life—a man who never rested on temporary success and continued the creative destruction of his painting styles. I would be delighted if those who like Fujita's work could read this with the feeling of conversing with him while taking a walk together.

“Memorandum on Leonard Tsuguharu Fujita: A Walk with Léonard Fujita”

Tsugutaka Fujita

Kyuryudo

258 pages, 3,500 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.