Galerie Plaisance

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, is a painter and a French engraver of Japanese origin. He was born on November 27th, 1886 in Tokyo and died on January 29th, 1968 in Zurich in Switzerland.
Tsuguharu Foujita was the son of a general and a doctor of the imperial army of Japan. He studied at the art college of Tokyo until the obtainting of his diploma in 1910.
In 1913, he leaved Tokyo for France where he continued to study the art.
In the district of Montparnasse he met Ortiz de Zarate, Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Kees Van Dongen, Diego Rivera, Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, and Fernand Léger and quickly made friendly of Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Models came in Foujita workshop in Montparnasse, among they Man Ray and Kiki, who posed bare for him.
In 1917, he met and wife Fernande Barrey a friend of Jeanne Hébuterne (the Modigliani's woman).
In some time Foujita reached a big fame as painter of beautiful women and cats, with a very original technique. His style oscillates between a representation inspired by purified  Japanese forms and a occidental modernity.
The black and the white are the most used colors of his palette.
After the dissolution of his third marriage, Foujita travelled and painted in all the Latin America and made a lot of exhibitions.
Two years later he was welcomed as a star in Japan. He stayed in his native country until 1939, then he leaved definitively Japan and didn't return any more.
In 1955, Foujita obtained the French nationality. He converted himself to the Catholicism after a mystic illumination. In 1966, he decided with his friend René Lalou to build a Romanic chapel in Reims in France. The decoration of this chapel was his last major work.
Léonard Foujita died from a cancer on January 29th, 1968 in Zurich, in Switzerland.