Nguyen Do Cung, Nguyen Tien Chung, Nguyen Sang and Bui Xuan Phai: painters, works and ideas ; 1947 – c 1984

The Philippe Damas collection focuses primarily on the painter-travelers, artist teaching and first graduating classes of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in the 1930s, whether they remained in the country or moved to France.

But the collection also includes more recent works that are just as emblematic of Vietnam.

While these remain faithful to the concept of “my land is my homeland”, they express different sensibilities.

For example, Nguyen Do Cung’s “La combattante” (The Fighter) was executed in 1947, when he was a member of the Viet Minh fighting for independence against French colonial authority.  The woman in military costume displays a hieratic posture she seems to have recently acquired, while the entire work is marked by a solemn austerity. A verticality rules, from the folds of her pants to the columns of the building. The wrinkled features of the fighter’s face convey a certain hardness, where fatigue vies with revolutionary spirit.

This spirit is echoed by Nguyen Sang’s 1957 silk (a rare technique for the artist), in which only the father’s face and hand, both attentive to the child, convey a humanity otherwise denied by the massive, nearly unreal silhouettes of the two adults. A humanization found in the faces of children in Nguyen Tien Chung (also 1957) in this rural huis-clos where the man seems to be the father.

A harsh atmosphere fills both works, heralding the later interrogations and future questioning of both artists…

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In the same year, 1957, Bui Xuan Phai was assigned to a carpentry workshop in Nam Dinh for 6 months as part of the “Three with” campaign (“work, live and eat with the people”). The previous year, he had been expelled from the Fine Arts School in Hanoi, where he taught, for his alleged dissidence during the Hundred Flowers.

Throughout his life, the painter remained faithful to themes that he repeated almost obsessively (here, the streets of Hanoi, almost deserted but not desolate; the actors of the cheo). Two exceptional works, one on newspaper (1964), perhaps depicting the Rue des Médicaments (Medecine street) in Hanoi, where he had just moved, the other in lacquer from the early 1980s. This was a brief return to the lacquer technique with which he had experimented in 1954.

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Only a restricted audience of insiders formed around pharmacist Tham Hoang Tin, the former mayor of Hanoi (1950-1952) and his family, ambassador Yvan Bastouil or Patrice Jorland and a few locals had access to these always lively meetings (in which Nguyen Sang regularly took part) where artwork was exchanged for a bottle of wine, usually and a bottle of Johnnie Walker for the most imposing….

For this particular group the meetings didn’t take place at Thủy Hử l’café emblématique but at Le Métropole (renamed Thống Nhất (reunification) in Hanoi.

There, painters and their works exchanged ideas in hushed tones, while the smoke from their cigarettes carried their hopes towards the nearby Hoàn Kiếm lake.

Jean-François Hubert