Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita--the Artist Caught Between East and West, by Phyllis Birnbaum. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, 332 pp., with photographs. $27.50 (cloth)

The line referred to in this excellent biography of the troubled artist, Tsuguharu Fujita (1886-1968), is the "thin line of amazing flexibility and grace" that "outlined cat and nudes alike." It could, the biographer tells us, "sweep around a naked woman's body with much courage, following the curves of hips and calves, seemingly without a break."

In describing his celebrated line, Foujita (he preferred the French rendering of Fujita) said "before I draw a line, I want to become one with the object and draw from my instincts." An implication was that he shared this idea with earlier Japanese artists, the sumi-e painters, the print-makers, all of whom cultivated a like line.

Indeed, as Foujita always claimed and as the patterns of his life here indicate, though he spent half of his life abroad, he felt ("from my instincts") the strongest and most troubled affinity with Japan and "Japaneseness."