Footnotes

裴春派 村莊景致 水粉紙本 一九六六年作

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the estate of the artist by the present owner


The Last Vanguards of Modern Vietnamese Art

Bonhams is pleased to bring to sale from an important European private collection a selection of works from two of the last vanguards of modern Vietnamese art, Bui Xuan Phai and Nguyen Tu Nghiem. Both artists belong to the last batch of graduates from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine (1941-1946), and were pivotal in the transmission of a modern sensibility.

This took place against a backdrop of development in Vietnamese art in the immediate post-war years, as artists situated in independence-seeking Vietnam sought new visual languages beyond the apogee of its first generation painters – particularly the diasporic artists in Paris like Le Pho – who created the aesthetic foundations in silk and lacquer painting. The colour palette of the latter was tropical and true to life but restrained to sorghum browns and greens. Vietnam stood fossilised, in memoriam.

The oeuvres of Bui Xuan Phai and Nguyen Tu Nghiem centred on the subject matter of daily and ritual life in Vietnam, from the Hanoi old streets beloved by Bui Xuan Phai to the traditional dances Nguyen Tu Nghiem was captivated by. Collectively, they injected realism – and a corresponding sense of romance – into Vietnamese art, steering its identity from the colonial-era preoccupation with deriving vernacular mediums and techniques to a modern, undisguised and more direct engagement with daily life. Dynamism and vivacity mark the fleeting glimpses of life captured by Bui and Nguyen.