Tsuguharu Fujita

born Nov. 27, 1886, Tokyo, Japan

died Jan. 29, 1968, Zürich, Switz.

Japanese expatriate painter who applied French oil techniques to Japanese-style paintings.

In 1910 Fujita graduated from what is now the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. Three years later he went to Paris, where he became the friend of many of the great forerunners of modern Western art, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani. He lived primarily in France but made periodic trips to Japan. During World War II he returned to Japan, but in 1949 he left and in 1950 took up residence again in France, becoming a French citizen in 1955 and being awarded the Legion of Honour in 1957. He was christened Leonard upon converting to Roman Catholicism in 1966.

Among his representative works, known for their blurred black-ink colouring and smooth, milk-white backgrounds, are “Self-Portrait with a Cat,” “The Cat,” and “A Nude».

JULES PASCIN

born, March 31, 1885, Vidin, Bulgaria.

died June 1, 1930, Paris

original name Julius Pincas, painter of the school of Paris renowned for his delicate draftsmanship and sensitive studies of women.

Born of Italian-Serbian and Spanish-Jewish parents, Pascin spent a number of years in Austria and Germany working for such satirical journals as the Lustige Blätter and Simplicissimus. In 1905 he moved to Paris where he continued to produce tragically satirical drawings of the demimonde. At the outbreak of World War I he travelled for a while in the United States, where he became a citizen, returning to Paris in 1920. There he began to create a series of large-scale, representational, and very sensitively drawn biblical and mythological paintings. Later he turned to the material for which he is generally known, the delicately toned, thinly painted, but poetically bitter and ironic studies of women, generally prostitutes. On the eve of an important one-man show of his work Pascin hanged himself.

DIEGO RIVERA

born Dec. 8, 1886, Guanajuato, Mex.

died Nov. 25, 1957, Mexico City

Mexican painter whose bold, large-scale murals stimulated a revival of fresco painting in Latin America.

A government scholarship enabled Rivera to study art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City from age 10, and a grant from the governor of Veracruz enabled him to continue his studies in Europe in 1907. He studied in Spain and in 1909 settled in Paris, where he became a friend of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other leading modern painters. About 1917 he abandoned the Cubist style in his own work and moved closer to the Postimpressionism of Paul Cézanne, adopting a visual language of simplified forms and bold areas of colour.

Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 after meeting with fellow Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Both sought to create a new national art on revolutionary themes that would decorate public buildings in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. On returning to Mexico, Rivera painted hisfirst important mural, Creation, for the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. In 1923 he began painting the walls of the Ministry of Education building in Mexico City, working in fresco and completing the commission in 1930. These huge frescoes, depicting Mexican agriculture, industry, and culture, reflect a genuinely native subject matter and mark the emergence of Rivera's mature style. Rivera defines his solid, somewhat stylized human figures byprecise outlines rather than by internal modeling. The flattened, simplified figures are set in crowded, shallow spaces and are enlivened with bright, bold colours. The Indians, peasants, conquistadores, and factory workers depicted combine monumentality of form with a mood that islyrical and at times elegiac.

Rivera's next major work was a fresco cycle in a former chapel at what is now the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo (1926–27). His frescoes there contrast scenes of natural fertility and harmony among the pre-Columbian Indians with scenes of their enslavement and brutalization by the Spanish conquerors. Rivera's murals in the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca (1930) and the National Palace in Mexico City (1930–35) depict various aspects of Mexican history in a more didactic narrative style.

Rivera was in the United States from 1930 to 1934, where he painted murals for the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (1931), the Detroit Institute of Arts (1932), and Rockefeller Center in New York City (1933). His Man at the Crossroads fresco in Rockefeller Center offended the sponsors because the figure of Vladimir Lenin was in the picture; the work was destroyed by the centre but was later reproduced by Rivera at the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. After returning to Mexico, Rivera continued to paint murals of gradually declining quality. His most ambitious and gigantic mural, an epic on the history of Mexico for the National Palace, Mexico City, was unfinished when he died. Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, was also an accomplished painter.

FRIDA KAHLO

Mexican painter noted for her intense, brilliantly coloured self-portraits painted in a primitivistic style. Though she denied the connection, she is often identified as a Surrealist. She was married to muralist Diego Rivera (1929, separated 1939, remarried 1941).

In 1925 Kahlo was involved in a bus accident that so seriously injured her that she had to undergo some 35 medical operations. During her slow recovery from the trauma, Kahlo taught herself to paint. She showed her early efforts to Rivera, whom she had met a few years earlier, and he encouraged her to continue to paint. After their marriage, Kahlo travelled (1930–33) with Rivera, who had received commissions for murals from several cities in the United States. In 1938 she met André Breton, a leading Surrealist, who championed her work; both Breton and Marcel Duchamp were influential in arranging for some of the exhibits of her work in the United States and Europe. In 1943 she was appointed a professor of painting at La Esmeralda, the Education Ministry's School of Fine Arts. Her house in Coyoacán is now the Frida Kahlo Museum. The Diary of Frida Kahlo, covering the years 1944–54, and The Letters of Frida Kahlo were both published in 1995.

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