I see an artist on the cusp of a wave risen up as the artistic traditions of East and West meet headlong in the art of a young Vietnamese artist in the early part of the 20th Century. Painted on silk, an Oriental tradition if ever there was one, that composition of the “Jeune fille” (titled in the language of the French imperialists) displays a synthesis of two quite different traditions of representation, colouration and style. The young woman is represented as almost but not quite making it into three dimensions, the thinnest of outlines on the left-hand side of her face and the strong framing of her hair to the right, work to flatten her face almost in the manner of an icon from the much earlier period of Western art even though the shading of her cheeks lean towards a western three-dimensionality. The table too betrays an Eastern style of perspective, or rather lack of it – showing a near-round disk as if we are looking down on it instead of across it to the girl who leans upon its far side insouciantly smoking a cigarette in a long holder which places the picture squarely in the mid 20’s. The objects on the table are all thus displayed at equal size – a printed book of Chinese pictograms, a traditional ink block and rubbing dish and some artfully displayed blooms in a shallow bowl. The colours are stronger than in traditional Eastern art and yet the face of the young woman evokes both Chinese art and Western paintings of the period with a very direct and frank intimacy – only emphasised by the white cat casually enfolded in the crook of her arm its tail perhaps trapped beneath that arm. This portrait is of a modern young woman, who is at ease with the artist but is somehow caught on the cusp of change both for her and the artist…
a new age beckons
pulling the young artist out
of Eastern art traditions
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to be inspired by the work of LePho – an early 20th-century Vietnamese artist and to write Ekphrastically to a theme from the following, women, flowers, landscapes or family. I have chosen to write a Haibun for this prompt.
