Dates

Wed., December 13, 2023 – Sun., May 19, 2024

Venue

Exhibition room 3

Western Painting: French Painting from Impressionism to the Early 20th Century

The Pola Museum of Art’s Western painting collection contains many important works by major artists, and traces the history of Western art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in France.

The paintings of 19th century Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot captured the effects of light with vivid colors and rapid brushstrokes. The Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat worked with bright colors and a pointillist technique, drawing on optical and chromatic theory. By the end of the century, Post-Impressionist painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne were pursuing their own expression of color and form. In the early 20th century, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso broke new ground for various types of free expression.

Léonard Foujita: The Secret of Milky-White Skin

The “milky-white skin” that became the stylistic trademark of Léonard Foujita (Fujita Tsuguharu, 1886–1968) was based on the ukiyo-e technique of leaving areas of the white washi paper blank to represent the skin. Foujita painted the entire surface of the canvas white, then applied delicate black outlines and soft shadows to render female flesh. The fabric of the canvas was not of the standard type but rather handmade with a fine cloth usually used for shirts and other items, and talc (or Siccarol baby powder containing talc) was mixed with the white ground to produce a milky white with a sense of transparency that found many enthusiastic fans in the artistic capital of Paris.

Regarding these contour lines, Foujita wrote: “A line is not just an outer perimeter, it is something that should be sought from the core of an object. The artist must gaze at the subject deeply and capture the line precisely. To understand this requires training, so as to grasp the essence of beauty.” (Fujita Tsuguharu, “Sen no myomi” [The Charm of Lines], Zuihitsu-shu: Chi o oyogu [Swim on the Earth], Kodansha, 1984.)

In this section we examine the relationship between Foujita’s objectives and expressive methods in depicting milky-white skin, a feature he developed in the 1920s.