Space 1951

Tsuguharu Foujita made this cityscape of Paris with watercolor. Look at the way the light touches the buildings; it’s all about capturing a particular moment, a certain atmosphere, and the feeling of a Parisian street corner. The beauty of this piece lies in Foujita’s application of the paint. See how the colors gently bleed into each other? The buildings are defined with thin washes of color, evoking the soft, diffused light and the sense of age, but they're also precise. There's something really special about the detail given to the textures and materials, from the stone of the buildings to the fabrics in the window. There are a couple of pops of saturated red, maybe they're flowers in a window box or a shop awning. Foujita spent a lot of time in France, but he was Japanese by birth. There's a sense of graphic design in this piece that reminds me of Hiroshige or Hokusai. But it's really a conversation between East and West, tradition and modernity.