10. 10AR (25529993/1) LÉONARD TSUGUHARU FOUJITA (1886-1968) Reclining Nude signed and dated 'Foujita 1929' and signed in Japanese (centre left); signed, inscribed and dated 'Paris 1929 Foujita' and signed in Japanese (on the stretcher on the reverse) oil on canvas Painted in Paris in 1929 54.5 x 81.5 x cm. 21 7/16 x 32 1/16 in. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Sylvie and Casimir Buisson. This work will be included in Vol. IV of the catalogue raisonné Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, currently in preparation. Provenance Private collection, Paris. Private collection, Paris (by descent). Exhibition Paris, Galerie Colette Weil, recent works by Foujita, 17 October - 5 November 1929. Bibliography S. Buisson, Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita: L'œuvre gravé et lithographié, Paris 1987, no. 30/76 (illustrated engraving). C. Weil, Femmes, Paris, 1930, (illustrated engraving). This female nude lying on her stomach is one of Léonard Foujita's best-known works, not because of the model's fame, which remains enigmatic to this day, but because Foujita himself selected it from among his most beautiful nudes to immortalise in an album of engravings entitled Femmes. The book was published in 1930 by Éditions artistiques Apollo and designed by the famous Colette Weil. She also exhibited the original works in her gallery, with a view to placing them in the best collections in the world. This beautiful reclining nude is one of them. The sight of a Foujita nude is spellbinding. It is an ode to softness and purity that transcends the body and captures the soul. With his exquisitely precise brushstrokes, the Japanese painter sculpts the skin of his models with the tip of his fine brush dipped in black ink and oil of the same colour, combining water and oil in translucent, almost ethereal layers, obtaining shades of pearly ivory that radiate an inner light. In her works, the naked woman floats in a bare space, bathed in an aura that gives her body an astonishing spiritual quality. The model's serene, dreamy gaze plunges the viewer into silent contemplation, where sensuality is subtle, ethereal, totally sacred. Foujita combined the art of Japanese drawing with the elegance of the École de Paris to create figures that embodied gentleness and intimacy. Here, nudity becomes a meditation on beauty, stripped of artifice, a suspended moment where each line, each shadow, invites a mystery that eludes yet captivates. Nudity is a subject that makes it possible to explore and unite cultural influences, particularly Eastern and Western, and to bring together multicultural riches. The great masters, Utamaro and Hokusai, were not the last to take up the subject of the naked woman in her intimacy. Foujita admired them just as he looked at what his era was developing on the subject. The Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt is undoubtedly the one who pushed to the extreme his passion for the female body, which is not only a physical representation but above all an emanation of sensuality. Yet in Reclining Nude, like Foujita, he uses soft, flowing lines that emphasise the woman's curves. Foujita, for his part, played on the unspoken with an oriental delicacy. He suggests and evokes the diaphanous skin and almost unreal softness of the model. These two artists, both enamoured of the female body, used different means, but both captured the vulnerability and beauty of their models without lapsing into vulgarity.