VietNamNet Bridge - After 40 years, the rarest and most complete collection by the late painter Nguyen Kao Thuong is on display in HCM City.
Workers in the Thai Nguyen Steel Complex by Nguyen Kao Thuong. |
The exhibition opened on Friday at the HCMC Museum of Fine Arts. According to Ralph Matthews, an American art collector, the entire sketches, watercolor and oil paintings in this collection had not been exhibited for 40 years.
The exhibition introduces a collection of 250 sketches and watercolors. Nearly half of them are watercolors on large paper, and six oil paintings on cardboard, accompanied with handwritten documents by the painter. All can be seen as the diary that vividly illustrated his life.
"The legacy left by Nguyen Kao Thuong proves that he is the most talented painter of sketches and watercolors of his time," said Matthews.
Some of the works by Nguyen Kao Thuong in his later years (around 1997) have been collected by the Vietnam Fine Arts Museums in Hanoi and HCM City.
These works won several art awards. During this time, he was sent to many countries in the world, as a staff of the Vietnamese diplomatic corps. In Cuba, China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, he recorded many images of landscapes and people in his paintings. Many portraits he sketched during this time have the characters' signatures. Most paintings annotated locations, characters and the time, corresponding to the period from 1957 to 1973.
His works are divided in groups, based on the time, the characters and the locations: sketches by pencil - China (1957), oil sketches on cardboard (1964), paintings and watercolors - Laos (1968), painting and watercolor - Mongolia (1970-71), painting - Soviet Union (1970-71), paintings and watercolor paintings - Cuba (1972), paintings and watercolors - Ho Chi Minh Trail (1973), drawings and watercolors depicting President Ho Chi Minh at the National People's Congress in 1945 (1971) ...
Nguyen Kao Thuong was born in 1918 in the southern province of An Giang. He died in 2013. He is one of the first southern artists to participate in the resistance agaisnt French.
Some artworks by Thuong:
The countryside in Laos.
Building the Truong Son road.
Workers in the Thai Nguyen Steel Complex.
Mongolian people.
Santiego, Cuba.
Russia.
Nuevista, Cuba.
Cuba.
Laos.
Building Truong Son road.
Portrait of a Lao head of state. |
T. Van