I first came across Foujita when I bought a postcard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was a self-portrait of him and one of his many cat muses. I always liked the gold earrings that he wore and would have loved to have seen him and all those other Montparnasse crazies running around in their heyday.

Phyllis Birnbaum's biography, Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita--the Artist Caught Between East and West, is nicely done and she's also translated and written about many other Japanese subjects, particularly women. Click here to read an excerpt from the Foujita book.