On October 27, 1924, while Vietnam was under the French protectorate, an artistic training center, the Indochina Higher School of Fine Arts (EBAI), was created in Hanoi. For its founder, the painter Victor Tardieu (1870-1937), representative of the colonial administration, it was about raising up a generation of plastic artists – and future masters – in a country where the notion of an artist does not exist, where creation continues. being considered crafts.
Winner of the Indochina Prize, Victor Tardieu, trained in the Fine Arts in Lyon and then in Paris, discovered Hanoi thanks to a scholarship he obtained in 1920. His meeting with a young Vietnamese man, Nguyen Van Tho, told him Nam Son (1890 -1973 ), a self-taught artist curious to discover Western art, convinced him to open an establishment where students, selected through a competition (ten maximum per promotion), could acquire, over five years, both technical and cultural knowledge. training equivalent to that of the Fine Arts in Paris.
Double harvest
In addition to art history courses, students would receive training in the fundamentals of Western art education: academic drawing, perspective, modeling, and composition. This without breaking with their traditional art: lacquerwork, painting on silk… The establishment, which opened its doors in 1925, has as its motto this thought by Auguste Rodin: “An art that has life does not reproduce the past, it continues it. »
As the historian Pierre Paliard points out in his book A Vietnamese art: thinking about other modernities (L’Harmattan, 2014, 2021), The initiative is not exceptional, “It is part of a very general movement of dissemination of a modern European culture”. However, it will not fail to arouse opposition among those for whom France’s “civilizing mission” unduly justifies political and economic oversight of the country.
On the occasion of the centenary of the creation of the school, Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier, deputy director of the Aguttes auction house, publishes a richly illustrated book, Modern art in Indochina (In Bella, 432 p., €75), which reviews the creation of the establishment, its pedagogy and focuses on some of the artists who have passed through there. Among them Lê Phô (1907-2001), Mai-Thu (1906-1980) and Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000), the most illustrious, who have the distinction of having spent their careers in France, to which the Cernuschi Museum , in Paris, dedicates an exhibition, within the framework of this anniversary. This sheds light, in 150 works and archival documents, on the role of the Hanoi school in the emergence of an art that synthesizes Vietnamese heritage and Western influences.
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