2023.3.3 藤田嗣治 猫と少女の部屋

2023.3.3 Tsuguharu Foujita Cat and Girl's Room

Special Exhibition

Tsuguharu Foujita: Cat and Girl's Room

  

Exhibition Overview

Karuizawa Ando Museum of Art opened in Karuizawa last October as the first museum in Japan to permanently exhibit only works by Tsuguharu Foujita. Following the opening exhibition, a special exhibition "Tsuguharu Foujita: The Room of a Cat and a Girl" will be held from Friday, March 3, 2023 to Tuesday, September 12, 2023.

The museum has a collection of about 200 pieces by Tsuguharu Foujita, a representative painter of the Ecole de Paris, which has been collected by Yasushi Ando and his wife Megumi for about 20 years. The collection began with a print that the couple came across by chance in a gallery while on a walk. Fascinated by the adorable cat depicted in the print, the couple subsequently began to collect not only cats but also works of young girls.

In honor of the group of works "Cat and Girl" that inspired the founding of the museum, this exhibition will be titled "Cat and Girl's Room." In addition, we will also introduce a variety of valuable works that represent each period of Foujita's artistic career, such as nudes with "milky ground" that is synonymous with Foujita's works, valuable landscape paintings from his early period, and solemn and tranquil religious paintings painted in his later years as Leonard Foujita, and you can see a total of 120 works from the Ando Collection. In addition, the valuable work "Cat's Classroom," painted during his stay in New York in 1949, will be shown for the first time in this exhibition. Please take your time to enjoy Foujita's masterpieces, in which expressive, humorous, and dynamic cats are vividly depicted.

Girl and Cat in Front of the Roofs of Paris, 1955, oil on canvas
A girl gazing straight ahead with two cats. This work was painted by Fujita after he returned to Paris after the war. From this time on, children, especially girls, began to appear more frequently in Fujita's motifs. The cuteness of the girl and cat, radiating a fresh glow along with the nostalgic scenery of Paris, forms the core of the Ando Collection.
Cat's Classroom, 1949, oil on canvas
This work was created during a stay in New York on the way back to France from Japan. The unique expressions of the anthropomorphized cats are truly charming, and this scene from a fun, everyday classroom seems to convey the joy of an era in which peace has been restored. This work is a perfect depiction of Fujita's specialty of cat expression, with fine whiskers, details like the cat's fur, and humorous expressions of the cats.
Nude with Arms Raised, 1924, oil on canvas
This work is a new painting technique called "milky ground" that brought Fujita "tremendous success" at the École de Paris. It is a valuable work that has the same composition as the second woman from the left in "Five Nudes" (owned by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) that was exhibited at the 16th Salon d'Automne in 1923.