Oil on canvas

47 x 38 cm. 18 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.

Signed in French on bottom left

LITERATURE
1991, Foujita et l'école de Paris, Musée de Montmartre, Paris, no.43
2001, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, vol. II, Sylvie Buisson, ACR Édition, Paris, p. 438
2004, Foujita, le Maître Japonais de Montparnasse, Montparnasse Museum, Paris, no.134
2005, Foujita entre Oriente y Occidente, Centro Cultural Bancaja et Barcelona, Barcelona, no .89
2007, 40 Anniversaire de la Disparition de Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Galerie Felix Vercel, Paris, no.5
EXHIBITED
10 Apr – 23 Jun 1991, Foujita et l'école de Paris, Musée de Montmartre, Paris
20 Jul – 8 Sep 1991, Foujita et l'école de Paris, Museum of Art-Ecole de Paris, Tokyo
27 Jun – 25 Sep 2004, Foujita, le Maître Japonais de Montparnasse, Palais des Arts et du Festival, Dinard
7 Sep – 23 Oct 2005, Foujita entre Oriente y Occidente, Diocesà Museum, Barcelona
Nov 2007 – Jan 2008, 40 anniversaire de la disparition de Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Galerie Felix Vercel, Paris

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Paris
5 Dec 1990, Sotheby's London Autumn Auction, Lot 154
Important Private Collection, Asia

The Peak of Perfection – Ideal Beauty

A Rare 1950s Masterpiece by Tsuguharu Foujita
Darling of Paris in a Wild Age

Tsuguharu Foujita was born in 1886 to a family of military doctors and is one of only a handful of artists in 20th Century art history to be revered as much abroad as at home. At the relatively young age of 35, Foujita's works were collected by such renowned art institutions as the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium. The artist was also one of the leading lights in the “Paris School” of painting, with his works praised by contemporaries Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Kees Van Dongan. The Western media dubbed Foujita “the darling of Paris” and it can reasonably be said that he was the only Asian painter to truly make it in the Western art world at that time. The artist's works have been highly sought after at auction since the 1990s and remain so today, with international exhibitions of Foujita's works regularly held around the world. For example, from 2018-2019, Muse Maillol in Paris held two retrospectives and in 2018 Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum held Foujita: A Retrospective - Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of his Death. To this day, his art continues to shine brightly wherever it is shown.

A Light of Change from the East

As a young boy, Tsuguharu Foujita learned about the Ukiyo-e painting of such renowned artists as Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Tamenaga Shunsui (1790-1844) from picture books. Foujita once said the first education he received was from the prints of the Edo period (1603-1867). The detailed and melodious, black and powerful lines of Ukiyo-e painting also foreshadowed his later creative work. As an adult, Foujita passed the entrance examination to Tokyo University of the Arts and in 1913 traveled to France where he forged his own artistic path. After viewing countless artistic masterpieces in the museums of Paris, the artist noted that if he was going to make a name for himself in the French art world, he would need the courage to do things Westerners had not and to infuse that with his own national character, thereby establishing a distinctive artistic voice. Foujita observed: “At the time, thick daubed pigments were a popular style, but I painted detailed works, others copied the broad brush strokes of Van Dongen, but I used a fine modeling brush and a writing brush. Still others copied the complex bright colors of Matisse, I was the only one to use just black and white in oil painting and that was how I sought to differentiate myself from all the other artists.” This deliberate approach resulted in Foujita developing his own unique painting style in 1919, using a fine modeling brush and combining ink, glue, and calcium carbonate white lead oil painting pigments on the canvas to depict a series of fine and elegant figures. In the process he created skin texture akin to the smoothness of Japanese ceramics and the “ingenious milky white color” together with gossamer fine ink lines became a unique creative signature that resulted in Foujita being nominated at the Paris Autumn Salon in 1919. Moreover, in 1921 he was afforded the unprecedented honor of being invited to serve as a judge at the exhibition, making him the first ever Japanese painter to do so and confirming his pioneer status in the annals of art history.

Japanese art critic Yoko Hayashi has divided the art of Tsuguharu Foujita into three broad creative periods; 1919, 1940 when he returned to Japan and his works focused on war motifs and 1949 when he left Japan and temporarily lived in New York. In 1949, Foujita had already been in Japan nearly a decade, but because of the limits placed on his creative work by the conservative environment, he determined to return to the West. Already in his 60s, Foujita first went to New York, where he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later acknowledged that the US art world inspired his boundless creativity and gave him the push he needed to return to Paris the following year. That year he started painting and held a solo exhibition at the Mathias Komor gallery in New York, almost all the works on show selling within one week of the opening. The extraordinary success of the event caused a stir and much debate, with the New York Times and New Yorker magazine running major features. The cultural stimulus from the US and the experience of once again being embraced by the public and collectors propelled Tsuguharu Foujita into the third creative peak of his career after returning to Paris in the 1950s. The auctioned work Deux Fillettes À La Poupée, which was completed in 1954, is one of the artist's most important works from that period.

Remembrance of Things Past, Idealized Existence

Before painting I like to become one with the object and, instinctively move the brush, to empty myself of all thoughts and allow the lines to flow from within ... The lines are not just outlines they come from an exploration of the core of the object. A painter must gaze deeply into an object in order to correctly grasp the lines.
——Tsuguharu Foujita

In Deux Fillettes À La Poupée, the wall is boldly divided into black and white to create a background with a sense of space and two young girls dressed in blue and red lift up a huge doll. The girl to the left looks directly at the viewers and is smiling slightly, as if displaying a treasured item of which she is proud. Foujita, deliberately magnifies the size of the doll, placing it at the center of the painting and making sure it takes up much of the scene. We can see the way in which he uses black and white fine lines to depict details; from the doll's hairstyle to its facial expression, the lace on the clothes to the heart-shaped cross on the necklace around its neck, the pearls decorating the belt to the sewing marks on the arms. The rich attention to detail is truly amazing and among the meticulous and flowing self confident lines we can feel how the maturity of the artist enables him to achieve harmony between object and self. After determining the core spirit of the object he is able to attain excellence and focus, his heart and mind in unison when painting. Research indicates that the doll in the painting was real. Foujita's mother died when he was five years old and as a result he was a relatively lonely child who shared his feelings with a doll that shared his bed at night. On returning to Paris in 1950 he made five children's dolls, the one in the painting being his favorite. In addition, the necklace with the cross around the doll's neck also reveals that the artist was a pious Christian, which adds an additional layer of meaning to the work. Throughout his life Tsuguharu Foujita painted countless works, but in only five of his oil painting are the central figures holding dolls. One of these, “Girl with a Doll,” is part of the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, highlighting the rarity of the auctioned work. When compared to the other four works, this painting is the best example of Foujita's classical milky white skin color, his complex and multifarious use of lines and also has the clearest theme, making it an extremely rare piece.

It is also worth discussing how Foujita portrays the two girls in the painting and why there are two rather than one. Both wear low-cut dresses that reveal their shoulders, with a large satin butterfly bow at the back and a headdress. In contrast to the year the painting was finished (1954) and the great modernity of the times, 30 years after Chanel began to design women's fashions, the clothes worn in the picture are at odds with the mainstream fashion of the times which was a V-neck round collar. In fact, this depiction can be traced back to the early 1910s when Foujita first arrived in Paris and the focus was on corsets and low cut fashion designs. This is intriguing and corresponds to an observation made by the artist in the 1950s: “In the past I had 3,000 models, today I paint from memory ... the children in my paintings are not depictions of models, and although I paint images of children seen in daily life, these are not children who exist in real life.” In Deux Fillettes À La Poupée, Foujita depicts the golden era of Montparnasse which he saw with his own eyes when he first arrived in Paris.

The earliest example of Foujita's depiction of two women can be seen in his 1918 work “Two Girls.” In addition, from the 1920s to the 1930s he often portrayed two nude women in intimate poses. However, in this work the artist does not attempt bold depictions of enchanting female forms or same sex love as he did in earlier works, instead he shows two companions who could be relatives. As a child, Tsuguharu Foujita had two older sisters who, after his mother died and father remarried, effectively brought him up. When Foujita painted this work he was in Paris and his family in Japan so it is possible this represents a reflection on his childhood and playing with his sisters, showcasing the longing for the past reflected in French writer Marcel Proust's classic work Remembrance of Things Past. That makes the painting touching in a different way, with Foujita employing his mature technical proficiency and thinking, together with the creative landscape of his mind, to detail a moving interpretation of ideal beauty through an unforgettable artistic work.

Price estimate:
HKD: 3,400,000 – 4,400,000
USD: 438,700 – 567,700

Auction Result:
HKD: --