Notes on Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita: A Walk with Léonard Foujita

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—a long-held dream of mine at the age of 66. I did this because I believed that to conduct full-scale research on my maternal great-uncle, Léonard Foujita, it would be beneficial to have a foundational knowledge of aesthetics and art history.

Foujita, whom I affectionately called "Bancho Jiiji" (Grandpa Bancho) during my childhood, had his studio in Kojimachi Rokubancho 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 Foujita 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 Foujita and knew his personality or the events that occurred around him. Therefore, as part of the last generation to know Foujita during his lifetime, I began to feel it was my mission to record these "notes" regarding Foujita and leave them for future researchers. Once I returned to being a student and began my research in earnest, primary materials such as reminiscences, diaries, memoirs, letters, and photographs related to Foujita began to be sent to me by relatives and others.

Then, in 2016, the diaries and photographs bequeathed by Foujita's widow, Kimiyo, to the Tokyo University of the Arts Museum were made public. The materials I had collected up to that point also served to complement the materials bequeathed to the museum. These "notes" are the result of weaving those materials together. Consequently, this book is not a specialized academic work on Foujita's art. Based on the primary materials collected so far, it is an omnibus-style record of fragments of Foujita'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 Foujita's way of life—a man who never grew complacent with temporary success and continued the creative destruction of his painting styles. I would be honored if those who like Foujita's work could read this with the feeling of having a conversation while taking a walk with him.

Notes on Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita: A Walk with Léonard Foujita

Tsugutaka Fujita

Kyuryudo

258 pages, 3,500 yen (excluding tax)

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