Foujita: Painting and Photography

Tokyo Station Gallery

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Artists

Tsuguharu Foujita

Tsuguharu Foujita was a leading Ecole de Paris painter, known worldwide for his signature milky white backgrounds. For this event, we recontextualize his art by exploring his relationship to photography, the exhibition’s keyword, from the following three perspectives:

1) A painter created by painting and photography
Foujita was widely featured in the media of his time, and it was his iconic self-portraits and widely reproduced photographic portraits that brought his look worldwide renown. One might call this a clever media strategy, one that successfully launched an unknown Paris-based painter from East Asia to the forefront of the global stage. Through these self-portrayals, we trace the process by which Foujita branded himself, crafting the image he wanted the world to see.

2) Painting created by photography
Like so many artists, Foujita used photography in his paintings. He used them in place of sketches to record the landscapes and people of the world during his travels, extracting and repurposing different details as needed in his numerous paintings. In this exhibition, we explore the fragments of photographs found in his paintings to examine Foujita’s process for using photography.

3) Photography created by a painter
Foujita owned several cameras, which he used to take thousands of photographs during his life. These Photographs are just as fascinating as his paintings, documenting glamourous Paris, singular Latin America, vibrant Beijing and Japan during his worldwide travels. This exhibition features a selection of his best snapshots from those housed in Japan and France, sharing yet another gateway into his unique sensibilities.

In these contexts, we examine the acts of painting and photography, tracing the trajectory of his gaze as it shifted between painting and photography to share Foujita’s charm from unexplored angles.

Schedule

Jul 5 (Sat) 2025-Aug 31 (Sun) 2025