VIEW FROM THE HILLTOP: Synthesized Modernism and The Legacy of Fine Art Education in Colonial Vietna
On November 22nd 2014, something extraordinary transpired in the Hongkong office of the international auction giant Christie’s. An oil painting by the 20th century painter Lê Phổ sold on that day for $840,000, setting an auction record for a Vietnamese artist worldwide. The seller of the precious painting, Patrick Lorenzi, was an Oslo-based Frenchman whose great grandfather was the governor of Tonkin, the French colonial polity in Northern Vietnam. The painting itself, titled View from the Hilltop, was an oil-on-canvas depicting a quintessential view of rural Vietnam, stylized and abstracted by a palette of muted, earthy colors (Figure 1). The nostalgic vista in View from the Hilltop collapses two traditions into one. On the one hand, the artist leveraged the powerful medium of oil on canvas taught to him by his French teachers at the l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (ÉBAI), creating a painting explicitly inspired by the Impressionist tradition of the Paris School. On the other hand, the compositional perspective of the work is entirely Vietnamese. To the opposite of the Western orthogonal linear perspective, the various components of the painting were laid out on a flat plain, typical of oriental art traditions. The painting nevertheless depicts nature, that universal language that inspires artists from both the West and the East.
Figure 1. View From The Hilltop
Lê Phổ
1937
Oil on canvas
50 x 85 inch
Lê Phổ (1907 - 2001) belongs to the first generation of Vietnamese artists graduated from the ÉBAI, the first official establishment of fine art education in colonial Vietnam. Victor Tardieu, a French painter formerly trained at the prestigious l’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris alongside Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault, founded the school in 1924. With a vision of conciliating Vietnamese traditional practices with an occidental approach, he designed a curriculum centered on the notion of synthesized modernity, namely the integration of traditional Vietnamese techniques onto a Western framework guided by the universal inspiration of nature. In order to be modern, the art of Vietnam must take as its centerpiece the vista of a timeless fantastical land tinted with rustic, pastoral imageries. What emerged out of this seemingly naive education initiative was not void of political implication. If Foucault writes at length about the interrelation between knowledge and power, the birth of modern art in Vietnam truly testifies to the complex entanglement of education and politics. This paper probes into one particular aspect of knowledge production, namely the creation of a particular way of seeing through fine art education in colonial Vietnam. Though greatly contested by the wake of the Revolution in 1945, this modality of seeing continues to lie at the heart of our imagination of Vietnam.
The Construction of a French Colonial Discourse: knowledge and power
The l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (ÉBAI) was established in Hanoi, the administrative capital of Indochina on October 27th, 1924. It operated under the supervision of the Indochinese University (l’Université indochinoise) and the Directorate-General of Public Instruction (la Direction Générale de l’Instruction Publique). The establishment of the school in Hanoi responded to the reality of demographic distribution prior to 1945. At that time, the three polities that made up modern Vietnam, namely Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, were home to roughly 70% of Indochinese population, attracting the majority of economic and infrastructural investment. From the administrative center of Hanoi, the French spawned a system of universities and institutions, intended for the studies of cultures in the colonies and the cultivation of an emerging class of native elites. Writing about the design of the colonial education system in French Indochina, Saaïdia and Zerbini (2009) posits
Déjà se dessine l’idée que le Viet Nam, c’est l’Indochine, plus encore l’Annam-Tonkin. Remarquons aussi que tous les titulaires de cette chaire furent des sinologues, y compris le plus « indochinois » d’entre eux, Henri Cordier. Cependant, les orientalistes de cabinet, rassemblés dans la vénérable Société Asiatique ne sont pas les seuls orientalistes « savants » à participer à la création d’une histoire de l’Indochine qui, remarquons le, pour toujours, dans la tradition orientaliste, sur l’étude des civilisation anciennes. (Saaïdia and Zerbini 97)
The system in Hanoi was spearheaded by an administrative body in Paris under the name of the l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient (l’ÉFEO), the legitimate center of studies on the Far East, including the studies of Indochinese cultures. Until 1930, the work of the l’ÉFEO revolved almost entirely around the study of classic orientalist principles. The main projects included archaeological and epigraphical researches of ancient civilizations, especially the lost empire of Angkor in Cambodia. By and large, notable writings produced during this time such as La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges often honed in on the topic of Indochinese antiquity (Saaïdia and Zerbini 99). As a result, the majority of personnel and financial resource were mobilized for the restoration of old monuments and artifacts, with the objective of creating a strong French presence in Indochina.
One encounters here a true example of the enmeshing of knowledge production into politics. A vehicle for propaganda to the French public, the l’ÉFEO promoted a specific vision of Indochina. The studies of traditional Indochinese societies laid the groundwork for the justification of colonization in the name of protecting the heritages at risk of disappearing, a clear indicator of the participation of the institution in the mission civilisatrice of the colonial Republic (Saaïdia and Zerbini 146). In reality, its research and studies reflected the infamous colonial practice of divide-to-rule (chia để trị), whereby the colonial administration classified and demarcated the borders of the different cultures in the peninsula. In this context, each region, each country in Indochina suddenly possessed different characteristics and identities altogether, not only for the ease of control but also for the testification of diversity in the New France. Within this paradigm, three distinct constructions of Indochinese arts, the most visible marker of its civilizations, emerged. The art of the Khmer was valued for its fantastical aesthetic embodied by the pittoresque splendeur of Angkorian architecture. For the Vietnamese, the position was reversed. The French considered the ancient art of Annam to be rather poor and focused instead on artisanal production. In effect, the Annamites were thought of as good artisans rather than good artists, their arts as decorative rather than true creative achievements. The art of Laos was virtually inexistent and often confused with Khmer art (Saaïdia and Zerbini 136). This divisive construction in general created a condition in which much attention was paid to the conservation of monuments in Cambodia and the education, and arguably transformation, of artisans in Annam-Tonkin.
In the face of withering indigenous monuments and artistic practices, the colonial regime opened numerous écoles d’arts appliqués, or applied art colleges, in Indochina. These professional écoles came first in Hanoi (1902), Haiphong (1902), Hue (1906), and Vientiane (1941). In Cochinchina, the situation looked somewhat different. The French established there mostly specialized schools - the l’École de Thu Dau Mot (1901) for woodwork, the l’École de Bien Hoa (1903) for bronze and ceramic, and the l’École de Gia Dinh (1913) for ceramic and engraving. In Cambodia, the l’École des Arts cambodiens separated itself from the Service des Arts cambodgiens in 1918 (Saaïdia and Zerbini 144). By the late 1920s, the French have put firmly in place a paradigm of visual representation in the colonies, composed of three parallel axes – the museum, the art college, and the commercial sale office. These three pillars of the visual construction of the colonies represented a program of action consciously designed for the edification of Indochina as a prosperous and worthy possession. The ÉBAI emerged in this context. Yet, unlike his contemporaries, the first principal of the school Victor Tardieu had a slightly different vision in mind. His objective was to create a cohort of Indochinese pupils who would build a modern art school while defending their cultural heritage.
The discovery of Vietnamese Art: The vision of Victor Tardieu for the l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine à Hanoi in 1924.
At the time of his appointment, Victor Tardieu was well aware of the strong influence of Chinese arts in Tonkin. Despite this recognition, he was more invested in the idea of a national style, a mode of artistic expression capable of carrying the genius of the Vietnamese people. In a report on the subject of the l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, Tardieu writes about a process of acculturation in which cultural heritage of Vietnam comes to full contact with occidental culture. He writes:
“Dépourvus d’éducation artistique, ayant perdu la foi dans leurs anciens maîtres, ils croient bien faire en méprisant leurs traditions ancestrales soit que les jetant pastiches, soit que les accommodant maladroitement avec les exemples occidentaux, ils inventent une sorte de style composite dont les échantillons déplorables se voient un peu partout ; vitrines étagères en forme de pagodes, buffets Henri II décorés de dragons…” (Paliard 11, emphasis mine).
This project of “synthesized modernism” entailed the injection of new elements into Vietnamese traditional art. In fact, Tardieu and his colleague Inguimberty explored several East Asian artistic traditions and Vietnamese folk arts to educate the pupils about their own history, encouraging a way of looking for beauty in the forms of the old days (formes d’autrefois). Yet at the same time the ÉBAI teachers advanced a pedagogy that favored life drawing, anatomy studies, linear perspective, and chiaroscuro, principles that were at odd with any indigenous Vietnamese arts. However, this project did not translate to the simple reproduction of occidental artistic techniques. Quite the contrary, what Tardieu was more interested in was the inspiration from nature, which he believed to be a universal capable of reuniting the views of the West and the East. He developed an interest in the visual culture of the 90 percent of the population living the countryside rather than the more immediate manifestations of modernity and development in colonial Hanoi where the school was located (Figure 2 and Figure 3). He instructed students to shy away from the pre-colonial practices of drawing from memory, encouraging them instead to sketch from real life, albeit from a very selective perspective. Moving far from the modern and westernized urban spaces, the first paintings produced by ÉBAI graduates were saturated with picturesque images of rural life. These paintings appealed readily to the French predilection for the “authentic,” a mode of representation popularized in Europe by the modernist artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), the Nabis, the Fauves, and others who rejected all vestiges of industrialization and urbanism in favor of the natural (Safford 2015:130). Tardieu for once proved worthy of his Paris School training. It was nature that should guide the art of painting.
Figure 2. An intellectual (Kẻ sĩ)
Victor Tardieu
1922
Oil on canvas
37 x 53 inch
Figure 3. Market by the River (Chợ bên sông)
Victor Tardieu
1924
Oil on canvas
Size unknown
Victor Tardieu informed the Governor of Indochina that, however, he had no intention to create indigenous painters. His focus instead was to make good artisans, those decorators capable of executing a good portrait.[1] In his own words,
“L’École des Beaux-Arts est pratiquement destinée à ramener la production artisanale dans le sens traditionnel, c’est-à-dire à restituer au peuple annamite sa véritable physionomie originale, sa personnalité…Il ne faut pas attendre de l’Indochine une grande activité industrielle et c’est méconnaître aussi bien sa terre et son peuple que de croire qu’on la verra un jour bâtie d’usines et hérissée de cheminées. C’est une terre féconde, un pays d’agriculteurs où les industries familiales si intéressantes et si particulières à la race sont justement exercées par un peuple d’agriculteurs gens laborieux par excellence qui occupent avec une si admirable activité les loisirs que leurs laissent leurs cultures (dans) leurs rizières. C’est sur eux que doit s’exercer ainsi que nous l’avons dit l’action de l’école des Beaux-Arts” (Paliard 35, emphasis mine).
The emphasis here was clearly to devise a program of action that would unite the students and instructors alike under the banner of synthesized modernism. Students were to be trained as artisans in “a traditional sense,” to embody the original personality of their country, to embrace the agricultural aspects of their culture instead of waiting for Indochina to evolve into an industrial landscape. The Director of the Directorate-General of Public Instruction, Monsieur le Recteur Bertrand, responded with great optimism to this project. He described the ÉBAI as “a sanctuary where one elaborates the artistic syntheses between France and Vietnam, where the qualities of our race fuse themselves harmoniously with those of Indochina.”[2] Considering such endorsement, it was without surprise that this vision and the rather condescending attitude towards native artists continued well into the second administration led by the French sculptor Évariste Jonchère.
What synthesized modernism meant on the ground were two-fold. First, the curriculum of the ÉBAI at the time explicitly encouraged the combination of seemingly traditional Vietnamese methods (namely silk and lacquer painting) with occidental practices and principles (namely oil painting).[3] Second, the works took inspiration from two main sorts of images – nature and the female bodies. Taking the case of Nguyễn Gia Trí, an ÉBAI-trained painter famous for his lacquer technique, one finds a collection of artworks done in a Far East fashion and takes the female figure as its central characters (Figure 4). Another famous ÉBAI graduate, Lê Phổ, also produced a prolific body of work largely inspired by the female charm, soaked in a palette of colonial fantasies and etherealism. A later graduate from the school, Nguyễn Đỗ Cung (ÉBAI 1929-1934) commented on the style of Lê Phổ with great admiration,
“The muse of Lê Phổ seems innocent and graceful, entering a dreamworld with elegance, as pretty as a poem by Samain.[...] The eyes of the painter do not see red and green clearly like the eyes of the ordinary people. He sees instead an indigo blue tinted with purple, a shade of red tinted with gold, a green hue as soft as the morning dew, as ineffable as the moment one’s fascination leaves him speechless, as vast as the moment one awakes in the early morning only to reminisce about a dream in silence...”(Nguyễn Đỗ Cung 1993: 15).[4]
Nostalgie or Hoài Cố Hương (Figure 5) is a perfect example of this poetic dreamworld. With graceful strokes of Chinese ink on silk, Lê Phổ turns the hushed green painting into a sentimental space. He outlines the contours of a female figure in traditional attire. Her face is tinted with sadness and longing, or perhaps a romantic aching for something far-gone and unknown. At the time of its birth, Nostalgie fit squarely into the contemporary trend in art and literature in the colonies. The sheer explosion of the use of female characters in paintings, novels, theatrical plays, and other arts acted as a metaphor for the modernization movement. The visual exemplars of the beautiful, carefree females found their counterparts in the increasingly popular novels of Tự Lực văn đoàn, a literary collective founded in 1933. In both textual and visual form, the ascendancy of the female bodies in the arts evinced a rejection of Confucian ideals and an embracement of interculturality (Paliard 76). Feminine figures represented an affective dimension in the arts that at once engaged and transgressed the masculine order of the colonial society.
Figure 4. Young Girls by Hibiscus Flowers (Thiếu Nữ Bên Hoa Phù Dung)
Nguyễn Gia Trí
1944
Lacquer on wood
Size unknown
Figure 5. Hoài Cố Hương (Nostalgie)
Lê Phổ
1938
Chinese ink and color powder on silk
23 3/4 x 18 inch
However, an entirely different interpretation is possible. Images of a bountiful natural world, when coupled with frequent depictions of dreamlike femininity, evoke a sense of nostalgia and call for protection. One recalls here the larger configuration of the colonial representation of Indochina discussed earlier in the paper. The French regime in its divisive depiction of Indochina constructed Cambodia as a land of lost heritage, signified by the images of a ruined Angkor in need of French civilization. In the case of Vietnam, the ÉBAI and its curriculum successfully instilled in the visual culture of Vietnam a dialogue of vulnerability and desires that valorized the colonial presence. For Indochina to be seen as a model colony, its visual representation must uphold a conscious or subconscious lack of resistance to imperialism (Norindr 1996, Robson and Yee 2005, Safford 2015). The paintings of ÉBAI artists were produced for wealthy Western patrons in Hanoi and Paris. Much of the imagery appealed to the bourgeois taste for orientalist phantasmagoria, the pleasing views of the East as a site of exotic fantasy, a perfectly mythicized world. The depiction of compliant natives freed from stifling traditions hence constituted a regime of evident for the need of control. As ÉBAI artists travelled to France to exhibit and continue their work, fine art became a precarious frontier where these Indochinese artists walked the tightrope of their hybrid identity.
But the gamut of visual representations, and in fact the entire concept of synthesized modernity itself, was hardly the mere expressions of a colonial agenda. Indochinese did not take modernity for granted. They invited it in. As Paliard (2014) points out, the synthesizing agenda of Tardieu never could have taken off without a crucial encounter with the Indochinese painter Nam Sơn (real name Nguyễn Vạn Thọ). Tardieu met Nam Sơn in 1923 when he first arrived in Hanoi on a research scholarship in Indochinese art. Tardieu was working on a mural for the Université Indochinoise when he came across the young Hanoian intellectual, who urged him to lobby for a French art school in Indochina. Nam Sơn cofounded the ÉBAI with Tardieu in 1924, but departed right after to train under J. P. Laurens and F. Aubert in Paris. When Tardieu came down with an illness in 1925, it was Nam Sơn who returned and worked in close capacity with the French painter Joseph Inquimberty to recruit the first class of students out of the 270 Indochinese candidates. It was a native of Tonkin that complicated the whole account of modern Vietnamese art.
With that said, the works of ÉBAI students in subsequent years constituted a far more complicated response to the initial project of Victor Tardieu. Writing in 2009, art historian Nora Taylor maintains that their works induced a realm of artistic practices in reaction against rather than in conformity with the colonial teachers. This painting style is “neither French, Francophile, nor anti-French,” displaying rather a transnational essence (Taylor 2009: 40). However, the split of responses to Tardieu and the ÉBAI curriculum truly came through after the school closed down in 1945. The contrasting trajectories of former ÉBAI students debunked the myth of Vietnamese artists as a monolithic collective. Indeed, at least two distinct camps of artistic practices arose during the revolution time. On the one hand, a revolutionary camp led by painter Tô Ngọc Vân adamantly refuted the French legacy. While keeping up with oil technique, these artists embraced a different idea of indigeneity that moved beyond integrating occidental methods with traditional folk art. A revolutionary painter of the time, Nguyễn Đỗ Cung (1993) explains this disposition in-depth:
In a nutshell, the art of our people has its own unique character. Our artisans create art in prohibitive, intensely oppressive condition yet they still stand their ground and fight for the cause of improving their lives. The dynamism and novelty, the indigenous quality (dân tộc tính) of our art rests within the working class (nhân dân lao động).[5] The ruling class as a whole merely mimics and borrows from the West, coercing others into serving their ostentatious taste and appearance. […] To intrude into the art of the people means to intrude into the life of the people. And the necessary reactions were the constant peasant uprisings that left a strong imprint in the arts. The struggle between these two artistic forces [of the working class and the ruling class] was at times latent, at times aggressive during the course of the history of national art [6] (Nguyễn Đỗ Cung 120).
Nguyễn’s statement resonated strongly with the position of the communists who took over Tonkin in the name of liberation movement in 1945. Records of speeches and writings at the time reiterate the idea of the artist as fighter. In a message to the participating artists in the 1951 National Art Exhibition, the communist leader and supposed father-of-the-nation Hồ Chí Minh (1951) contends that the responsibilities of the artists were “to serve the Resistance, the Fatherland and the people, first and foremost the workers, peasants and soldiers.” With regard to creative work, this means getting in touch with the people’s life, conveying the heroism and determination of the soldiers, and contributing to the improvement of these qualities through the arts. For Hồ, nothing was truer. Literature and arts must undergird the economic and political struggles. The new revolutionary government strongly upheld the zeitgeist of the time. After a brief hiatus, the ÉBAI reestablished itself in 1948 as the Hanoi College of Fine Art. Under the leadership of Tô Ngọc Vân, a revolutionary painter and 1931 ÉBAI graduate, the school set in motion a fully revolutionary program. This initiative produced a generation of artists that later became known as the “Resistance Class” (Khóa kháng chiến) of Vietnamese art. Unlike his peers at the ÉBAI who came from largely privilege backgrounds, Tô Ngọc Vân had a humble upbringing that allowed him to be more sympathetic to the cause of communism. Upon his appointment as the principal of the new College of fine art, Tô expressed a three-fold vision. First, he believed that the revolutionary artist must use his art to serve the lives of people, which was namely to facilitate the agenda of the party and the government. Second, the artist must beautify the lives of people with his art. Third, he must guide them towards a higher stage of artistic appreciation (Nguyễn Đỗ Cung 25). As such, Tô considered fine art as a true revolutionary task and the trained artist as a revolutionary official (cán bộ). To become a true worker of the revolution, however, that official must train himself in fine art to cultivate a specific mentality and tonality for his practice.
The mentality in question here was a complete refusal of the earlier French influence. Indeed, the painting syllabus at the college in 1952 included a compulsory component called Lớp Chỉnh Huấn, roughly translated as Attitude Correction or Reeducation Class. These weekly sessions were designed for self-criticism and repudiation of bourgeoisie art, namely the Paris School’s impressionist tradition that came with Victor Tardieu. Looking at the score of paintings, drawing sketches, and sculptures produced by these artists, one cannot help but notice a strong preference for socialist realism (Figure 6). Indeed, a wide array of representational imageries of peasant life and the communist struggle then coagulated into a visual repertoire that survived well into modern time.
Figure 6. Hai Người Lính (Two soldiers)
Tô Ngọc Vân
1954
Color powder on paper
Size unknown
But it soon became clear to the Communist government that to create a uniform political body of artists under the flag of proletarianism was a utopian vision. Since the 1930s, there existed a second camp of artists who followed an artist-as-intellectual approach and called for the continuation of an elitist lineage. The forerunner of this faction is no one other than the now legendary painter Bùi Xuân Phái. A 1944 graduate of the ÉBAI, Phái developed a career out of paintings of rainy Hanoi streets, whose style were deemed too nostalgic of a time past and lacking revolutionary zeal. In a time that favored representational and realist visuals for propaganda purpose, his work was highly stylized, abstract, and affectively charged. His technique points to a clear Paris School influence and most notably to his fascination with the works of the fauvist masters such as Albert Marquet and George Rouault. Hence while Tô Ngọc Vân was referred to as a national hero for leading painting classes in the hills of Việt Bắc, Bùi Xuân Phái who rejected all revolutionary values in his career was heavily criticized for his “bourgeoisie” and “decadent” taste (Trần Hậu Tuấn 1992; Taylor 1999). His unpopularity among party members confined Phái to a life of non-recognition and financial hardship. A frequent visitor of Café Lâm, a boutique coffeehouse for intellects and artists throughout the wartime, Phái often used his painting to pay the bills, turning the shop into his mini gallery.
Today in Vietnam however, Bùi Xuân Phái has become a cause célebre among the young artists. His gloomy streets earned him the name Phố Phái, and a posthumous Hồ Chí Minh Prize in 1996. Just how a revolutionary outcast became a recipient of the most coveted national title remains an enigma for scholars of Vietnamese art. While images reminiscent of revolution fervor still play a great role in the visual representation of the country, the most sought after artworks from Vietnam today are those of people like Lê Phổ and Bùi Xuân Phái. The record-breaking sales of Vietnamese paintings at the Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction houses have always come from these two artists. Phái paintings alone consistently reached five digits while all other work from Vietnam measured only up to a mere 10,000 US dollars (Taylor 1999). Even under the weight of demands for propaganda art, the most desirable visual artifacts that come out of Vietnam convey a very different story, one that points back to the ambiguous birth of modernity in fine art education.
The ascendancy of Lê Phổ, Bùi Xuân Phái, Nam Sơn, and many other first-generation ÉBAI artists on the international art market bespeaks the complex legacy of colonialism. While Vietnam continues to move forward, art patrons and clientele from around the world seem to look to the past to guide their vision of what the country should be. The public for Vietnamese art grew very rapidly since 1994 when the United States lifted the economic embargo against Vietnam. Artworks from Vietnam started to gain popularity among Western collectors for the same reason that Primitive and Aboriginal art attracted the interest of Westerners in the early part of the 20th century (MacClancy 1988; Myers 1994, 1998; Taylor 1999). The paintings of classic ÉBAI artists draw a picture of Vietnam that was timeless and feminine, dreamlike and ephemeral. They are the leftover remnants of a nostalgic landscape that seems to disappear before the eyes of the viewers. Like the colonial fantasy that fascinated the public of Paris at the dawn of the 20th century, the modern gaze into Vietnam and Vietnamese art also appears primitive and exotic. The score of tourists that have been flooding into the country since the 1990s soon appropriated for themselves the same visual disposition. With the influx of foreign investment and development projects, with the overturn of pedestrians and bicycles by cars and motorbikes, the country looks increasingly like the West. Yet, tourists projected their nostalgia into the paitings of the ÉBAI masters, pining for a time of untouched nature and beauty. The vogue for Vietnam in modern time mirrors the vogue for Indochina in French popular culture. The quest for authenticity in pristine allure and timelessness against the backdrop of an everchanging Vietnam now forms a pastiche that lays at the core of the imagination of the country.
The enigma, however, remains the ready appreciation of the Vietnamese themselves for the same mode of representation. In the post war perriod, Bùi Xuân Phái rose to the status of a “national hero.” His posthumous fame testifies to what Taylor maintains as the “versatility of the definition of a national hero” (Taylor 1999). It seems as if the Vietnamese authorities suddenly found in the colonial fantasy an expression for the resilience of the nation. Images of a historic and peaceful past did exactly that. They validated the sense of sadness and longing that permeated the void of identity in Vietnam after the war. The ÉBAI paintings capture the fascinating landscape and culture of a Vietnam that only exists in people’s mind. During the last phase of French occupation, Victor Tardieu achieved an unthinkable task. He inaugurated not merely a school of art but a way of looking that continues to inform the country’s art scene to this day. As such, the fact that Vietnamese historians and international art collectors alike found in the arts of the ÉBAI painters the various emblems of Vietnam speaks volumes to the role of art in constructing culture, history, and nationhood.
In closing, it seems proper to revisit the notion of allegory in the writing of James Clifford. As Clifford notes, history is a process not of inventive life but of an irresistible decay. Like a disappearing structure ever inviting reconstruction from the imaginative minds, the ephemerality of material life and the urge to preserve it for posterity underpin ideas of the allegory (Clifford 1986:119). The history of modern art in Vietnam could likewise be understood from this point of view. As Victor Tardieu introduced the project of synthesized modernism into Indochina, his vision transformed itself into an eclectic pictorial methodology. The story of synthesized modernism resembles an allegory, something that “says one thing and means another.” As an allegory prompts us to speak of cultural description not in symbolic terms but as morally charged story about ourselves, the way of seeing that emerged from synthesized modernism reflected France’s perception of its presence in Indochina. This mode of looking is an act of translation, of making legible the social fabric of Indochina in French terms. As such, it did not go without challenge from contrasting ideas of what Vietnam was and what it should be. Yet, as shown by the cases of Lê Phổ, Bùi Xuân Phái and many others, the remnants of this particular way of seeing still leave great imprint on the popular imagination of Vietnam. The colonial fantasy that collapsed the past, the present, and the future in a historicist plane is still as alive as ever. The only different is that the one gazing from the hilltop is no longer the colonizer of the past. He might as well be any of us.
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NOTES:
[1] “Je n’ai pas l’intention, bien entendu de former des peintres, mais sans en faire une spécialité, un bon décorateur doit être capable d’exécuter un bon portrait.” (Victor Tardieu, assorted notes from the Victor Tardieu Collection, French National Institute of Art History).
[2] “ un sanctuaire où s’élaborent les synthèses artistiques franco-annamites, où les qualités de notre race viennent fusionner harmonieusement avec celles de l’Indochine.” (Remarks cited by A. N. Beun in “Rénovation de l’Art Viet-Namien”, an article on the reviews written by Victor Tardieu, p.82, Victor Tardieu Collection, French National Institute of Art History).
[3] I say seemingly traditional because Vietnamese artists had in fact adopted and reformed several techniques from China i.e. woodblock and silk paint prior to the establishment of the ÉBAI.
[4] “Nàng mỹ thuật của Lê Phổ ngây thơ, đài các đi vào cõi mộng, thướt tha và thấp thỏm đẹp như một bài thơ của Samain. [...] Con mắt họa sĩ không trông xanh đỏ rõ ràng như mắt mọi người, nhưng những màu lam biếc tím, những vẻ đỏ ửng vàng, những vết sương xanh êm ái, ngập ngừng như khi ta say sưa mà không thốt được ra lời, mênh mông như khi buổi sáng yên lặng, chợt tỉnh, ta ôn lại giấc mộng thần tiên.”
[5] The very difficult concept to translate here is dân tộc tính. The phrase can mean either indigeneity or nationality. Under the tonality of the writing, the meaning seems to come closer to nationality or nationalness, yet I use “indigenous quality” here as a reference to the French notion of Vietnamese indigenous or traditional arts.
[6] “Nhìn chung lại, chúng ta thấy nghệ thuật của dân tộc ta có cái độc đáo của nó. Nghệ nhân ta làm nghệ thuật trong điều kiện bị cấm đoán, chèn ép khá nghiệt ngã nhưng vẫn đứng vững và đấu tranh cho nguyện vọng cải tiến cuộc sống của mình. Cái sinh động, tươi mát, cái dân tộc tính của nghệ thuật ta là của nhân dân lao động. Còn giai cấp thống trị nói chung thì chỉ có bắt chước, lai căng, bắt người ta phục vụ cho thị hiếu phô trương, hình thức của mình. [...] Can thiệp đến cả nghệ thuật của nhân dân là đã can thiệu nhiều vào đời sống của nhân dân rồi. Và sự phản ứng tất yếu là những cuộc nông dân khởi nghĩa liên tiếp nổ ra, và những sự kiện đó không khỏi in dấu vết vào cả trong nghệ thuật. Cuộc dấu tranh giữa hai khuynh hướng nghệ thuật trên đây thể hiện lúc ngấm ngầm, lúc gay gắt trong suốt quá trình tiến triển của lịch sử nghệ thuật dân tộc.”
