Expressionism

Foujita was born in Tokyo (Japan) on Nov. 27, 1886.
He died on Jan. 29, 1968, Zürich, Switz.
also called FUJITA TSUGUHARU, OR LEONARD FOUJITA,
Japanese expatriate painter who applied French oil techniques to Japanese-style paintings.
He attended the Imperial School of Fine Arts in Japan and was a success immediately after he began painting, and the emperor bought him some works of art in 1911. Despite his following, three years later, Foujita moved to Paris in 1913 because he felt he could learn more in that fertile artistic community. He became the friend of many of the great forerunners of modern Western art, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani. It was there that he pioneered the technique of using stamped impressions of color along with brush strokes on his canvases. He lived primarily in France but made periodic trips to Japan. He traveled extensively and took inspiration from each trip, blending elements in a seductive style that meshed Japanese tradition with Occidental modernism. Foujita was a success in France and lived there for most of his life, returning to Japan only for three years during World War II, becoming a French citizen in 1955 and being awarded the Legion of Honour in 1957.
He was christened Leonard upon converting to Roman Catholicism in 1966.
He made lithographs, soft-ground etchings, and aquatints, which were usually portraits. He liked painting cats, young girls and beautiful women. Among his representative works, known for their blurred black-ink colouring and smooth, milk-white backgrounds, are "Self-Portrait with a Cat," "The Cat," and "A Nude." ...

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