Elegance

One of the year's slickest shows opened in a Manhattan gallery last week. The paintings, by 62-year-old Tsuguharu Foujita, were as clear and dry as the Martinis served at the opening, though not so powerful.

On opening day, visitors slowly circled the room, later clustered in a corner to congratulate the artist, who favored each of them with a slight bow, a miniature smile, and a small, limp hand. The ring which he had once had tattooed on his finger was concealed by a wide gold band, his tattooed watch by one that told the right time. It was not easy to connect the gentle and sedate old Japanese with the Foujita of old.

Bangs & Tangos. "The year 1913," a French critic once wrote, "was distinguished by the arrival in Paris of Foujita and the tango." For a while they were almost equal sensations. An ambitious art student who had thrice been refused admission to the Tokyo Salon, Foujita rightly reasoned that his black bangs, Harold Lloyd glasses and whisker-fine brush drawings would please Parisians more than they did his fellow Japanese. He came to know Montmartre better than he had Fujiyama, strolled its steep streets in a leopard-skin hat, followed by a brace of tabbies on a leash.

Society swells and bohemians alike flocked to Foujita's exhibitions. Utrillo and Modigliani swept him off on their absinthe binges, though he himself never touched a drop. Matisse dropped around to ask how he made his lines so thin and firm (he does it by holding the brush vertically, in the Chinese way, and drawing from the shoulder instead of the wrist), and solemnly assured him that had he been born in Europe his name would have been Picasso. The Lucky Strike people asked Foujita for a testimonial; his response (for use in Paris newspapers): "Women like to kiss me because I smoke Lucky Strikes."

In 1939, Foujita abruptly turned his back on all that and took off for Tokyo; he was afraid the Germans would bomb Paris. When the Pacific war came he was conscripted to paint combat pictures at $33.76 a month. Among the most popular was Raid on Pearl Harbor, done from an aerial photograph. He was bombed out of his Tokyo studio; his black bangs turned to silver. At war's end he shipped a show to Manhattan (TIME, Sept. 8, 1947) to raise money for a trip to the U.S.

Ladies & Animals. The 20 paintings in Foujita's new show had all been done in the past eight months. The most memorable of them were snowy idealizations of naked ladies lying down and animal pictures that brought Arthur Rackham and the fables of La Fontaine to mind. He had been inspired to start both series, said Foujita, by a dream in which animals in human dress had mingled with humans in nothing at all.

Foujita used no models for any of his new pictures. His silvery nudes belonged "to no nationality, no epoch. I have had 3,000 models and I don't need them any more." He had imparted an oriental delicacy to such details as the hair and toes, but generally slurred over the major elements that better draftsmen are apt to emphasize: the thrust of a knee or elbow, the twist of a torso or the solid bulge of a thigh. Shining out against deep black backgrounds, his nudes had more flow than form.

Stories & Compositions. Animal pictures like Foujita's School (see cut), held most visitors longer. No living artist could match his rendering of cats in action, or endow them with such a storytelling variety of expressions. Foujita minimizes the anecdotal element in his art. "I paint my cats one by one," he says, "and I have no idea what each cat will look like until I come to it, but I do know about the picture as a whole and that is what counts." Still, the charm of School lay in its separate characterizations at least as much as in the composition.

Foujita, who likes round numbers, claims to have sold some 8,000 pictures in Europe and Japan. Chances are that he will find an eager market in the U.S. too, for every picture in last week's show had wit and a refinement of texture, line, and color that added up to elegance. In a time like the 18th Century, when elegance was nine-tenths of art, they might have had great critical as well as popular success.

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