The Cernuschi Museum tells the story of the birth of Indochinese art in Hanoi

“Woman with her hairstyle” (1942), painting on silk by Mai-Thu. MAI-THU/ADAGP COMMITTEE PARIS, 2024 On October 27, 1924, while Vietnam was under French protectorate, an artistic training establishment, the Higher School of Fine Arts of Indochina (EBAI), was created in Hanoi. For its founder, the painter Victor Tardieu (1870-1937), representative of the colonial administration, it was about bringing out a generation of visual artists – and future teachers – in a country where the notion of artist was n does not exist, where creation remains considered as craftsmanship. Winner of the Indochina Prize, Victor Tardieu, himself trained at the Beaux-Arts in Lyon, then in Paris, discovered Hanoi thanks to the scholarship he obtained in 1920. His meeting with a young Vietnamese, Nguyen Van Tho, said Nam Son (1890-1973), a self-taught artist curious to discover Western art, convinced him to open an establishment where students, selected through competition – ten maximum per class – could acquire, over the course of a course of five years, both technical and cultural training equivalent to that of the Beaux-Arts in Paris. Double culture In addition to art history courses, students would be trained in the fundamentals of Western artistic education: academic drawing, perspective, modeling, composition. This without breaking with their traditional art – lacquer work, painting on silk… The establishment, which opened its doors in 1925, takes as its motto this thought of Auguste Rodin: “An art which has life does not reproduce the past, he continues it. » As the historian Pierre Paliard underlines in his book A Vietnamese art: thinking of other modernities (L’Harmattan, 2014, 2021), the initiative is not exceptional, “it is part of a very general movement dissemination of a modern European culture. However, it will not be without arousing opposition among those for whom France’s “civilizing mission” improperly justifies political and economic supervision over the country. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the creation of the school, Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier, associate director of the Aguttes auction house, publishes a richly illustrated book, Modern Art in Indochina (In Fine, 432 p., 75 €), which looks back on the creation of the establishment, its pedagogy, and focuses on some of the artists who have passed there. Among which Lê Phô (1907-2001), Mai-Thu (1906-1980) and Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000), the most illustrious, who have the particularity of having made their career in France, to which the Cernuschi Museum, in Paris, dedicates an exhibition, as part of this anniversary. This sheds light, in 150 works and archival documents, on the role of the Hanoi school in the emergence of an art that synthesizes Vietnamese heritage and Western influences. You have 66.03% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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