![]() ![]() He compared his own self-marketing to a Citroën campaign: “There’s nothing that beats the combination of ability and publicity.” Born in Tokyo in 1886, Foujita was 13 when he told his father, a high-ranking military doctor, that he wanted to be an artist. With his trademark bangs, gold earrings and tortoiseshell glasses, Foujita cultivated his celebrity status. When asked by a polite reporter about her early life as an artist’s model, she replied: “Model? I was a streetwalker!” The woman was his trash-talking second wife, Fernande. During the 1920s, at the height of his popularity in Paris, “Fou-Fou,” as he was nicknamed by his French friends, attended a costume ball dressed only in a loincloth and carrying a cage on his back with a naked woman inside. Arriving in Marseilles in 1913, at the age of 26, he posed for a photographer wearing “a mauve frock coat and a white solar topee” - the proper headgear for “British colonialists in tropical lands,” as Phyllis Birnbaum writes in “Glory in a Line,” her engaging portrait of the artist as cultural chameleon. ![]() IT must have been unnerving to encounter the Japanese artist known as Foujita.
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