Owing to difficulties with copyright and assembling the now diffuse body of his work spread across continents, there has been no large-scale retrospective of the artist's oeuvre, and no chance to examine the artist's career in full -- until now, in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, in "Tsugouharu Foujita: 120th Anniversary of His Birth."

Foujita proceeded to the Western course of painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1910. He later reflected on the experience as "no more than mere copying of a single teacher." Venturing to France in 1913, he soon visited Picasso's studio where he saw Cubist works and paintings by the naïve artist Henri Rousseau. The anecdotal result of the encounter was that on returning to his hotel room, he threw down his paint box, exclaiming "that is how free painting should be."

The following early years in Paris were ones of practice and experimentation. He was said to have done 300 to 400 works in the Cubist style, only of which a few survive, like "Cubistic Still Life" (1914). His subsequent "Cubist" development moved more in the direction of the naïve style following Rousseau, like "Visionary Landscape" (1917). All the while he was also painting moody realistic landscapes of his French surroundings like "Fortress in Paris" (1917).

Foujita became a member of the Salon d'Automne in 1919, but it was the distinctive body of work he began submitting from around 1921 that won him fame then and now. His "grand fond blanc" -- milky white oil on canvas imparting a ceramic-like appearance to the painting surface -- is amply demonstrated by the exhibition in works such as "Nude with Tapestry" (1923). The delicate line work is often compared to traditional Nihonga painting practice, but also finds sources in Foujita's studies of Picasso and the Mexican Diego Rivera, Greek jars and Egyptian art. Considerable financial success followed and established Foujita's reputation as one of the leading painters of "The School of Paris," an eclectic group of expatriate artists following after modernist masters such as Picasso and Matisse. The "School" itself was without stylistic or ideological continuity -- a parallel borne witness to in examining Foujita's artistic career.

By the end of the 1920s, Foujita was wavering in his commitment to his trademark milky-white reduced palette, and so he splashed into a colorful world of expressionism that often emphasized bulbously proportioned women. Leaving Paris in 1931 for the Americas, he adopted expressionism as his central artistic mode, and when he returned to Japan in 1933 it continued in nostalgic form with subject matter depicting a Japanese way of life that was fast disappearing. The result was a desire for a studio which he built in 1937 and pictured in 1938 in "My Studio in Tokyo," decked out with hibachi and dyed curtains in classical Edo style.

That nostalgia for things Japanese nourished Foujita's transition to a Social Realist style of mural painting depicting war zones while in the employ of the Army and Navy Ministries during World War II. The painter's arm "must be a gun," he ignominiously declared in the 1940s, and so he painted nationalist imagery like "Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End" (1945), showing Japanese civilians driven to despair, disemboweling themselves rather than risk capture.

Criticism by the gadan (circle of painters) after the war for his production of overtly nationalist imagery inevitably rekindled Foujita's desire to return to Paris, which he did in 1949 by way of the United States. In 1955 he became a French citizen and in 1959 a Catholic convert with the baptismal name Leonard. There followed a host of religious works like "Descent from the Cross" (1959), the genesis of which lay as early in his career as 1927 with more restrained representational approaches as in "Adoration of the Magi."

In the devout final years of his career he turned to the portrayal of a fantastical cast of animals and children that carry something of the appeal of children's book illustrations. In these pictures and other portraits like "Café" (1949-63) he also returned in attenuated form to his grand fond blanc.

Foujita's flights between countries, artistic styles and even national identities evidence an unsettled temperament, establishing him as a composite figure whose oeuvre became disjointed and dilettantish. His proximity to the giants of modernism served to bolster his career, but at the same time, his cobbling together and dilution of the styles of his contemporaries inevitably position him as a conservative, though popular, artist.