Theater of Cruelty (39 page)

AT THE HEIGHT
of his fame, in 1920s Paris, the Japanese painter Foujita, or Fou Fou to his friends, would draw up at the café Le Dôme in a canary-yellow chauffeur-driven Ballot touring car with a little bronze Rodin bust on the hood. The limo was a birthday gift from Foujita to his then-twenty-one-year-old mistress and later wife, “Youki” Badoud, who, dressed to the nines, would sweep into the café with her husband, as both acknowledged the waves of his adoring fans. Fou Fou, with his large gold earrings, his fringed haircut, his tattooed wristwatch, his round spectacles, and his outlandish dress, was so famous in Paris that department stores displayed mannequins of the painter in their windows. Society ladies lined up to be portrayed by Foujita. He partied with Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Kees van Dongen. His were the most talked about, most outrageously imaginative costumes worn at the legendary arts balls. Foujita even did judo demonstrations at the Paris Opéra.

This is the way Foujita is still remembered in France, as one of the most colorful figures of the Roaring Twenties, one whose art may not, in retrospect, be of the first rank but still retains an aura of exotic, Oriental modernism. Foujita died in his adopted country in
1968, after becoming a French citizen and converting to Christianity, as Léonard Foujita—a homage to Leonardo da Vinci.

In his native Japan, Fujita Tsuguharu has a more complicated reputation. Even though his many pictures of cats, nudes, and bug-eyed children have been exhibited regularly and still fetch high prices, he is best known for his stint during World War II as Japan’s most prolific, and to some most scandalous, propagandist for imperial militarism. There is a photograph, reprinted in Phyllis Birnbaum’s
Glory in a Line
,
¹
of Fujita (no longer Foujita, let alone Fou Fou) in Tokyo around 1942, minus the large earrings and famous fringe, reading
Signal
, the Nazi propaganda magazine.

Seen side by side, it is hard to imagine that
Last Stand at Attu
(1943), depicting a Japanese suicide charge on the Aleutians, was done by the same man who painted
Nude with a Jouy Fabric
in Paris (1922). One is full of violence, painted with a density to suggest an enraged horror vacui; the other is stark and sensuous. Foujita, the flaneur who went about Montparnasse in Greek tunics or outfits cut out of floral curtains, had become Fujita, cutting a dashing figure in wartime Singapore in a mock general’s uniform. What remained constant in these transformations was his dandyism. His paintings, like his clothes, were often contrived for public effect, to make a splash, to strike a pose. Birnbaum relates how the artist would stand beside his
Last Stand at Attu
in a Tokyo museum, dressed in combat boots and a helmet, bowing each time a visitor dropped money for the war effort into a collection box.

Foujita always was keen on dressing up, with a particular fondness for cross-dressing, which Birnbaum duly notes without making
much of it. Perhaps she should have at least made a stab. Dressing up as a courtesan at Tokyo art school parties is one thing, but turning up in front of his classmates in red underwear, claiming to be a female prisoner just escaped from a local jail, and being paraded around town with his hands tied is more intriguing. When an elderly Frenchwoman in Paris once spotted Fou Fou in his floral curtain costume and inquired whether he was a man or a woman, he replied, “Unfortunately, I am a man.” And what are we to make of his habit of walking hand in hand with Kawashima, his male Japanese friend, in Paris, both dressed à la Grecque?

Perhaps Birnbaum is right to avoid psychological speculation. But if psychologizing is a temptation she manages to dodge, certain postmodern stylistic tics mar what is otherwise a well-told story. She mentions Foujita’s first wife, Tomi, and the negative comments made about her in Japan. “If I were her biographer,” she writes, “I would mull over their comments.… But I’m not writing the woman’s story this time around.” Why not? If it adds to our understanding of Foujita’s life, the story of his first wife is surely worth mulling.

Still, Birnbaum does dwell, quite rightly, on the practical side of Foujita’s grandstanding. He was a kind of performance artist, anticipating Andy Warhol. “When I look back on those days,” he said later, “I feel that my clothing was very crazy. But at the time, I thought it was extremely artistic. I thought that I myself had to become a work of art in every way.” On another occasion he came closer to the point:

As a social and artistic climber, if nothing else, Foujita was an astounding success. Conquering Paris had been the dream of most Japanese artists who painted in the European style ever since Impressionism conquered Japan (a victory that is still evident in the work of many Japanese painters today). It could be a highly destructive dream. Birnbaum mentions the story of Saeki Yuzo (1898–1928), one of the most revered Japanese painters, whose short life illustrates the tragic misunderstandings that marked Japan’s artistic confrontation with the West.

Obsessed by Vincent van Gogh and Maurice de Vlaminck, Saeki moved to Paris in 1924 in a rush of romantic passion to be a modern painter. Vlaminck, however, took one look at one of Saeki’s paintings and dismissed it as derivative, academic, and dull. A Japanese artist, in his view—one echoed by most Europeans enchanted by Japanese woodblock prints—should paint in the Oriental tradition. Attempts by Japanese artists to work in the Western style were regarded as inauthentic and thus doomed to failure. Saeki, driven mad by frustrated ambition, died four years later in a mental hospital. Obscure in the West to this day, his reputation in Japan is that of a genius who paid for his art with his life.

The idea that Asians cannot enter into the traditions of Western art is a form of blinkered Orientalism. It would disqualify many of the greatest classical musicians of our time. But it must be said that the work of most Japanese painters in the Western style was, and often still is, derivative and academic. The modernist idea of expressing oneself in a totally new way, inventing styles, and struggling with one’s predecessors, as Picasso did with Velázquez, say, was unfamiliar to artists of Foujita’s generation, born in a culture where masters were to be emulated and schools to be joined. This did not inhibit photographers, filmmakers, playwrights, or novelists nearly as much,
since they were less fixated on foreign masters. But Japanese painters, no matter how hard they tried, rarely managed to get away from their European models.

Except Foujita. His art may not have been as good as some of his contemporaries thought, but it was distinctive. Unlike most Japanese in Paris, Foujita escaped from cultural isolation by learning to speak French, however badly, and cultivating European contacts. Not only did he make a well-received spectacle out of himself at a party thrown by Kees van Dongen by dancing in a loincloth and singing Japanese folk songs, but he was introduced to Picasso by Diego Rivera and was much impressed by Henri Rousseau’s
The Poet and His Muse
hanging in Picasso’s studio. “
Tiens
,” Picasso is supposed to have said, “you are the first painter to have noticed this work.” Quite what Picasso made of Foujita’s own art is not recorded. When he saw Foujita’s nude painting of Youki at the Salon d’Automne, he took a long look at the model herself and remarked: “So that’s Youki. She is even more beautiful than in your painting.”
²
Youki was delighted. Whether Foujita should have taken it as a compliment is less obvious.

Foujita’s encounters with European modernism quickly made him realize that he had to ditch all he had learned at his art school in Tokyo and start again:

Birnbaum shows convincingly that Foujita could be a serious artist as well as a self-promoting party animal. He spent hours studying paintings in the Louvre, as well as experimenting in his studio. Unafflicted by the diffidence often attributed to Japanese abroad, Foujita also picked up fashionable models. Kiki de Montparnasse, who posed for everyone from Soutine to Man Ray, described her first encounter with Foujita in her memoir, whose candor was deemed so shocking in the US that it was banned here for many years:

Foujita was a stickler for hygiene in an environment where cleanliness was in short supply. His friend Modigliani rarely changed his clothes and shoved his excretions under the bed. Soutine’s room was so infested by bedbugs that one of them got into his ear and had to be extricated in a painful operation. And there, in the midst of this bohemian squalor, was Foujita, carving out a space for himself in the Paris School. He never gave in to the French demand for Japanese exotica—pictures of carp or temple roofs—that provided some of his compatriots with a living. Instead, he did something much cleverer, which at its best was startlingly original. Beginning with a base of white paint, he drew his subjects in black lines with fine Japanese brushes, merging the techniques of Asian ink painting with Western
oil painting, mixing the practiced spontaneity of the former with the careful layering of the latter.

Birnbaum, with good reason, places the pinnacle of Foujita’s artistic achievements in the early 1920s, with such paintings as
My Room
, shown at the 1921 Salon d’Automne,
Reclining Nude with a Cat
, and
Nude with a Jouy Fabric
(of Kiki). She writes that Foujita’s achievement is easiest to appreciate in the company of more colorful works by his European contemporaries: “For maximum effect, hang a Foujita among Picasso’s loudly dressed harlequins, the deep red and blue of a Modigliani portrait, and a bloody beef carcass by Soutine. Beside these blasts of color, Foujita’s stark paintings stand out as acts of courage.”

The French certainly thought so at the time, unlike many Japanese critics, who resented Foujita’s self-publicizing, which they regarded as showy and undignified (and maddeningly successful), and they dismissed his Japanese touches as cheap Japonaiserie. This was too harsh. Foujita was one of the very few painters who fused East and West in a plausible manner. But I’m not sure that even his best oil paintings have quite stood the test of time. They are decorative, skillful, and certainly original, but shallow. I prefer his ink-and-watercolor drawings, the delicate self-portraits and portraits of women, and his woodcut illustrations for books.
⁴
Foujita, in these pictures, was influenced by Western art, while working in a Japanese tradition without indulging in pastiche or repeating old formulas.

Foujita’s remarkable success in France soon spread to other parts of the West. Among other places, he had shows in London, Amsterdam, and New York. This makes his turn, in the 1930s, toward
belligerent Japanese chauvinism all the more surprising. Among his less successful expatriate colleagues it was a common volte-face. Many Japanese artists, frustrated in their attempts to impress the West, turned from disdain for Japan and its artistic traditions to a vengeful loathing of the West. One famous example, mentioned in Birnbaum’s book, was the poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro. In the 1910s and 1920s, he wrote odes to his beloved Paris and expressed his “respect and love” for “the Anglo-Saxon race.” A few decades later he celebrated the war on Britain and America: “America and England have been rejected by the Heaven and Earth of East Asia. Their allies will be crushed.”
⁵

But Foujita had little reason for such bitterness. Perhaps, however, artistic and social success were not enough to compensate for the strains of cultural assimilation. Extraordinary things came from the Japanese confrontation with the West, but often at a high personal price. Like Takamura and many others, Foujita began by rejecting Japan, which he described in letters to his first wife as “not a country for artists.” The disapproval from other Japanese in Paris can only have added to his disgust. But he also remained the proud son of a military doctor, who craved recognition in his native country. It is the common fate of Japanese who have made it abroad to be accused of pandering to foreigners, of “reeking of butter.” Even the great filmmaker Kurosawa Akira, who never lived outside Japan, came in for this envious treatment.

Foujita first went back to Japan in 1929, accompanied by Youki, partly to escape the French tax authorities. He was not universally welcomed. Critics accused him of caring only about money and fame. In return, perhaps out of pique, Foujita lectured Japanese artists on
their provincial ways. Youki recalls in her memoir how he would make special trips from Tokyo to Yokohama to buy Gauloise cigarettes from French sailors. This was not such unusual behavior for Japanese artists returning from Paris; even today you will still find painters in Tokyo sporting long hair and French berets, even if they have never set foot in the French capital.