Tsuguharu Foujita

Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1964

Loiret, Château de Chamerolles, Foujita et ses amis du Montparnasse, 2010, illustrated on the cover and in the catalogue

The canvas is not lined, surface is slightly dirty. Under UV light: dots of retouching at extreme lower left corner, center of right edge, and center of upper edge. In addition, there is a 2 inch circle of inpainting to the right of the figure's neck. This appears to be addressing circular cracking that existed before and does not interfere with the composition. The work was sensitively restored and is in very good condition.
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Painted in 1960, the present work is testament to some of the major preoccupations of Tsuguharu Foujita's mature period. In discussing this period and the artist's focus on the female model in medieval dress, Robert Rey notes, "in Asia, every childhood is sacred. ...it is by instinct that Foujita transforms the children of France into fairies. Consider what becomes of Cosette from Vicor Hugo's Les Misérables, a book the artist perhaps never read...: a little girl unburdened by the slightest misery" (quoted in Sylvie Buisson, Foujita et ses amis du Montparnasse, Paris, 2010, p. 134). Foujita's paintings from this period increasingly combined religious or historical imagery with a remarkable sensibility for feminine expression to create images subtly laden with suggestion and strong visual impact. As Sylvie Buisson explains, "the boundaries between the sacred and the profane became confused" (ibid.).

 

In Jeune fille à la corbeille de fruits the artist revisits a motif first broached in the months preceding his baptism with Ève, his 1959 depiction of Eve surrounded by the animals of Paradise (fig. 1). In the present work, however, we see a young girl in the place of the female nude, holding not an apple but a peach against her breast. Foujita's elegant young girl is meditative and immutable, her large eyes fixed and blank. Her gaze and form are nevertheless delicately charged with an interior intensity and a knowledge inferred by the positioning of the peach and Foujita's sensuous outlining of her exposed neck and shoulders. The nape of the neck being one of the principal areas of focus for the representation of eroticism in Japan, Foujita's masterful combination of line and space directs our eye to precisely this part of the composition. The artist's modernity and originality reside in precisely this fusion of the formal training of his Japanese heritage, the finesse of his monochromatic lines, with the reinterpreted iconography and luminous palette of his adoptive country.