Bui Xuan Phai

(1920-1988)

Nude

Footnotes

The work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity issued by Duc Minh Art Gallery, dated 11/07/2001.

Provenance
Duc Minh Art Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in July 2001
Private Collection, USA

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You have painted a number of nudes and flowers; all these paintings are very beautiful but these are upper-class beauties. Why don't you make paintings about lower-class beauties around us?

—Ho Chi Minh, September 1945

Revered as one of the most prominent modern painters of Vietnam, Bui Xuan Phai was the last generation of graduates from L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine (The Indochina College of Fine Arts). Together with Nguyen Tu Nghiem, Nguyen Sang, and Duong Bich Lien, they formed the 'Four Pillars' which greatly influenced later generations of Vietnamese painters as well as the development of modern art in Vietnam.

During the 1955 Hundred Flowers Campaign, a brief period of openness in North Vietnam, Phai supported an intellectual movement advocating freedom of expression and creative independence and was involved in other movements questioning the politicisation of culture. As a result, Phai lost his teaching position at the Hanoi College of Fine Arts. He was not permitted to present his artworks in public until a solo exhibition in 1984.

The present lot by Bui Xuan Phai dated 1963 is a rare work as nudes and abstract works were forbidden from public view in Vietnam until 1990. Phai found it problematic to use art simply as a tool for political propaganda, and while we do not know if the beauty in this work is "upper-class" or "low-class" as she is devoid of attributes, her feminity is explicit, exposed, and emphasized with the use of sgraffito. This brazenly provocative work if exhibited or discovered at the time, would have seen Phai incarcerated.

Nude was acquired from the Duc Minh Gallery Collection. Duc Minh (born Bùi Đình Thản) was one of Vietnam's most important art collectors. He rescued artwork from potential destruction during the Vietnam war (1920-1983) and his French-style villa, now a museum was a rendezvous for artists and a haven for freedom of expression. Duc Minh's patronage allowed the likes of Bui Xuan Phai to survive a very difficult time in history by providing them with financial support and the best paint and canvas he could find.