A celebration of 110th birthday anniversary of To Ngoc Van (1906-1954), one of Viet Nam’s most influential painters in the first half of the 20th century, has just been organised by the Vietnam Fine Arts Association.


{keywords}

Two ladies and child (1944), oil and canvas, by To Ngoc Van. The painting can be seen in the permanent exhibition at Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. 

“Painter To Ngoc Van’s imprint is an outlook that no other painters have, which is integrating his personal feelings, thoughts and trends into his work instead of just representing contemporary matters of life”, says art critic Nguyen Hai Yen at the celebration.

“His motto is: A painting is not only beautiful in real life but also in the manifestation of its creator’s inner feelings. Vân can be seen embarking on expressing the role of an artist, not an inscriber of facts, in his works,” she added.

Graduating from the Indochina Fine Arts College, To Ngoc Van influenced many Vietnamese painters of later generations and has been greatly appreciated by the art circle abroad. He was a talented painter and became famous before the August Revolution in 1945, with his oil, lacquer and silk paintings.

He was one of the pioneering painters to assimilate Western methods in a creative way, and combined them with his inheritance of national artistic traditions. He left us a number of works of high artistic value including Young Woman with Lilly in 1943, Boats on the Perfume River in 1935 or Woman by a Lotus in 1944.

Following the National Resistance by President Ho Chi Minh, To Ngoc Van and other renowned Vietnamese artists left Hanoi for the liberated area and joined the artistic circle where he devoted all his talent and experience to make his contribution to the long war. Also during that period, he created many lacquer paintings and sketches portraying the landscapes and lives of northwestern Viet Nam as well as watercolour paintings depicting the land reform in 1953.

Together with painter Nguyen Do Cung (1912-1977), To Ngoc Van was one of the artists that laid the foundation for Viet Nam’s Theory and Criticism of Arts, contributing to the many talented painters of the first generation of Viet Nam’s Arts.

He was unfortunately killed on his way to Dien Bien Phu at the age of 48.

He was one of eight top-notch Vietnamese painters to be awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize for Literature and Art and the Independent Order, 1st class in 1996. 

VNS