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for Lê Phổ
Lê Phổ
French, born Vietnamese, 1907 - 2001
Le Pho’s work has a distinctive elegance, along with imagination and artistry, which immediately suggests a background of culture and taste. Consequently, one is not surprises to learn that Le Pho was the son of the Viceroy of Tonkin (Viet Nam) and that his first one-man show in Paris was considered sufficiently important to be sponsored by the Embassy of Indo-China.
Born in Viet Nam on August 2, 1907, Le Pho had a cosmopolitan back ground even as a young art student. He first studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi for five years from 1925 to 1930, and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the following two years. In 1933 on his return to Hanoi he was appointed professor in the Hanoi Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a post which he held from 1933 to 1936. While studying in Paris he had the good fortune of being a student of Victor Tardieu who during his art student days had been a friend and companion of Matisse.
Le Pho’s professorship in Hanoi came to an end when he was sent back to Paris in 1937 as a delegate to the International Exposition in Paris and served also as a member of the jury of his Exposition. Since that time, Le Pho has remained a resident of Paris. His first one-man show there in 1938 was the first step toward his subsequent active and important painting career in Europe. In resent years he has had numerous one-man shows in Paris, Nice, Lyon, Strasbourg, Nantes, Rouen, Brest, Algiers, Casablanca, Brussels, Caracas and Buenos Aires, as well as in New York and San Francisco. Also he has served as artistic advisor to the Embassy of Viet Nam in Paris; has been a prize winner in the International Exhibition of Beaux-Arts of Saigon; and has become an annual exhibitor at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris.
Already his paintings are permanent collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris as well as in the collections of numerous French museums outside Paris.
Le Pho uses radiant, shimmering color with great beauty and skill. Also, as critics mention, his finely outlined subject detail is woven into exquisite flow of delicately modulated color harmonies, which both suggests his Oriental background and gives definition and increased substance to the amorphous fantasy of his color planes.
“To harmonize his own temperament and his technique, Le Pho has preserved the process of painting on silk. The very delicacy of the material on which the painting is executed demands a refinement of design and of color to which present day art is not accustomed. But it is precisely this recourse to the art of another age which demonstrates the audacity of this artist and the interest inherent in his efforts.”
Raymond Cogniat - Le Figaro
“ In the work of Le Pho we penetrate fully the fairy world which the Orientals, and in particular those of the Far East, are capable of depicting poetically on precious material such as silk. A native of Indo-China and spiritual heir to the best artistic traditions, Le Pho employs a technique which joins widely different concepts, some springing from the world of Occident, others from Oriental civilization. The effort to synthesize these two worlds is clearly evident in his work. But the viewer remembers above all the pure, almost elusive Oriental character which dominates the delicately lovely work of Le Pho.”
La Croix
“ This Vietnamese painter educated in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi has lived in Paris for many years. The French influence, however, has not alienated the personality of this subtle and refined artist so as to make him forget his own traditions and his own sources.”
Prisme
“ His canvases are like charming visions in which the purity of line and delicacy of the chromatic range confer a real beauty.”
La Revue Moderne
“ Le Pho’s paintings of flowers and of people enjoying gardens add to the traditional art of Asia a sort of pungent Impressionism in the style of Bonnard.”
Arts
“ The misty diffusion of color makes his bouquets vibrate with remarkable luminosity. In his paintings on the theme of mother and child, Le Pho succeeds in expressing the idea in which he excels: the search for the moment in which light plays in poetic touches on the familiar forms of objects and of flowers.”
Liberté - Dimanche
“ In his family scenes, his paintings of mothers, Le Pho transmits to us the finest of human sentiments and sensations, the poetry of intimacy, of light, of woman’s beauty and women’s maternal tenderness, the charm of children. He barely outlines the models he uses by means of undulating lines and subtle tones, with unvarying transparency, a delightful movement and a sure touch. The yellows and greens he employs for his decorative backgrounds lend an exquisite touch of life and movement. They are gracious evocations of joy, of happiness, of refined spirituality and the utmost sensitivity.”
Paris - Normandie
“ Le Pho’s art is an interpretation of joy: joy of flowers, of family affection, presented with an emotion that is at the same time sincere and measured. His still lifes are true portraits of flowers opening under an irresistible luminosity. In his art one sees the beautiful result of the assimilation and the fruition of the blending of two artistic heritage’s, that of the Orient and that of our own. Here one sees a rich past joined in his paintings which moves the beholder without being tinged in the slightest by false exoticism.”
Les Derniéres Nouvilles d’Alsace
“ The tones in the paintings of Le Pho suggest rather than analyze, beautify rather than detail, the charm he so marvelously synthesizes of the spiritual and physical aspects of his subjects. His paintings of mothers and children are truly delightful, ingenuous and direct, as far away from abstraction as they are from realism. All his feminine figure paintings posses that sensitive eloquence of beings who seem to have come out of a lost paradise long before our age of change and moral disintegration.”
Le Pho was born in Ha Tay province in 1907. He was one of the first graduates of the Indochina Fine Arts College, 1925-1930 intake.
He specialised in silk and oil painting. He has been living and working mostly in France since 1936. His main subjects for painting are flowers and women with dreamy beauty and nobility.
He has works in the Fine Arts Museum of Vietnam, the Paris Museum of Modern Arts, Oklahoma Museum (United States) and private collections, mainly in the US.
He was a professor at the Indochina Fine Arts College in 1933 and has been to China and many European countries. He also participated in international exhibitions.
In 1937, Le Pho participated in the Fine Arts Exhibition of Colonial Countries in Paris as the art director for the Indochinese region and, in 1941, he took part in the Grand Exhibition in Algeria with painter Mai Thu.
From 1950 to 1957 he was an art advisor to the Vietnamese Embassy in France.
He opened exhibitions in Lyon, Avignon, Nice and Bordeaux with Japanese painter Foujita in 1957 and 1958.
Some of his main works are ‘Young Girl and Orchid’ (silk) and ‘Still-life’ (oil).
Person TypeIndividual
French, 1824 - 1898
