FUJITA TSUGUHARU

• FUJITA TSUGUHARU was a major figure in twentieth-century painting who fused the delicate linear sensibility of Japanese painting with Western oil-painting techniques, establishing a distinctive position in the Parisian art world. After arriving in France in 1913, he developed his artistic language through contact with artists in Paris, and after the First World War began incorporating the linearity and compositional sensibility of Japanese and East Asian painting into his oil technique. In the 1920s, he established his celebrated “milky-white” style, applying exceptionally fine ink lines and subtle modelling over a smooth, milky-white ground, and gained acclaim in Paris for his nudes and portraits. His travels through Central and South America and Asia after 1929 broadened his subject matter and palette, leading in the 1930s to increasingly vivid colours and large-scale figural compositions. After returning to Japan, he produced war paintings during the Second World War, pursuing monumental compositions dominated by rich brown tonalities. Following his return to France after the war, his subjects shifted towards children, animals, interiors and Christian themes, while in his later years he once again developed delicate compositions using a distinctive white ground. Throughout these successive phases, Fujita continually refined his treatment of line, colour, composition and surface, creating a highly individual artistic language that brought Japanese and Western pictorial traditions into dialogue.

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