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Lot Essay
Much as Joseph Inguimberty and Victor Tardieu, in their positions as the professor and director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Hanoi were consciously preventing the development of Vietnamese art into a mere westernising superficiality, this particular work demonstrates a typical Western idealisation and romantisation of the Indochinese women and landscape.
The work presents the lush vegetation of the tropics as well as the demure oriental beauties in a theoretical manner as the sitters were not portrayed in a natural and realistic postures but elegantly poised for the making of this picture. Such idealisation of the French colony would continue for more than 2 decades after the inception of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1925. The first generation Vietnames artists who were under the tutelage of the French artist could not avoid a 'self-exoticising' process, which took a poignant turn to be a quasi-nationalistic expression when many of them moved away from their native land and settled in Paris. This group of artists, amongst them, Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam would constitute the group of Franco-Vietnamese artists who continuously paint the idyllic beauty of their homeland and people in the 1940s throughout the 80s, perhaps in response to the war torn motherland.
The work presents the lush vegetation of the tropics as well as the demure oriental beauties in a theoretical manner as the sitters were not portrayed in a natural and realistic postures but elegantly poised for the making of this picture. Such idealisation of the French colony would continue for more than 2 decades after the inception of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1925. The first generation Vietnames artists who were under the tutelage of the French artist could not avoid a 'self-exoticising' process, which took a poignant turn to be a quasi-nationalistic expression when many of them moved away from their native land and settled in Paris. This group of artists, amongst them, Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam would constitute the group of Franco-Vietnamese artists who continuously paint the idyllic beauty of their homeland and people in the 1940s throughout the 80s, perhaps in response to the war torn motherland.