Tsuguharu Foujita

Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson, Chicago
Private Collection, La Jolla, California
Acquired from the above

Executed on cream wove paper. Sheet is T hinged to a mount at three places along upper edge. Sheet is slightly undulating near lower edge due to thick application of gouache. Otherwise fine, work is in very excellent condition.
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The present work brilliantly combines two disparate traditions familiar to Foujita. 

After studying Western Painting at Tokyo's School of Fine Arts from 1905 to 1910, the young artist was urged by his father to remain in Japan.  However, in 1913, he considered his artistic training complete, and embarked for Paris, then the epicenter of artistic innovation. He established his studio in Montparnasse and within months had made the acquaintance of  Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and Léger.  He swiftly mastered the Cubist and Futurist idioms, but equally quickly elected to create his own style, forsaking strict adherence to any artistic orthodoxy. 

Foujita's first single-artist exhibition was held at the Galerie Cheron in 1917 and was an enormous success.  For this show he painted watercolors employing traditional Japanese techniques of sumi ink and fine brushes.  (Leonard Foujita, exhibition catalogue, Masaaki Ozaki, 'On Tsuguharu Foujita,' National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2006, p. 188).

In Le rêve, Foujita fuses the Japanese tradition of Byobu screen painting with Western aesthetic elements from early Renaissance art, an amalgam made possible when he put his own personal stamp on the practices of his Parisian contemporaries, as they embraced more Modern methods of painting and rejected spacial illusionism.  The Edo period (1600-1868) saw a great rise in the popularity in gold ground screens with scenes of daily life painted on them.  As evidenced by Foujita's self-portrait as a kneeling donor to a tranquil deity, shown with his distinctively cut hair shorn into the tonsure of a Dominican monk (Fig. 1) he was clearly acutely aware of the early Renaissance tradition of gold ground painting as well.  Foujita's genius was to draw inspiration from his varying sources and to produce brilliantly original artwork that was entirely his own.

Fig. 1 Tsuguharu Foujita, Autoportrait en prière, 1925, ink and gold leaf, Private Colleciton