LE PHO, " LA FEMME AUX ROSIERS “ (THE WOMAN WITH ROSES) CIRCA 1940
OR THE INCREDIBLE SWEETNESS OF BEING

The present gouache and ink on silk of large size is remarkable for the extreme softness which emerges and for the painter’s technical virtuosity at his peak.

Everything radiates a rare elegance found in all aspects of the painter himself.

The delicate face displays an attentive confidence that the urban Vietnamese woman acquired in the 1930s in the spirit of Tu Luc Van Doan, an emancipatory movement in which many students or graduates of the Hanoi School of Fine Arts participated, including Nguyen Gia Tri, Nguyen Cat Luong (the inventor of modern ao dai) and... Le Pho.

The purple ao dai, the plucked eyebrows, the lipstick, the discreet make-up, are all visible signs of emancipation from the Confucian world in this graceful young woman -- a world that Le Pho challenges. Yet coming from the world of mandarins, he knows there is no social and mental order for an artist, disorder is only order with no power. Contesting the status quo means confrontation, instability, doubt, refusal of dogmatism. Those are the elements necessary for the expression of talent.

In 1937, he settled in Paris where he found the freedom he yearned in Hanoi after his first stay in 1931-32. That is when he painted La Femme aux Rosiers.

Freeing her neck with the scarf in her hand, the young woman leans, looking pensive. She is leaning against a simple bamboo fence that separates her from us, framed by the curtain in the background. Le Pho paints her body and face, more elongated, stylistic premises of the late years and early 40s. The title of the work, written on the back, is no indifferent: Le Pho takes particular care in the representation of these roses, white almost diaphanous, some in bloom and others budding. He knows that the white rose in what is still his adopted country is a symbol of purity and of refinement, like this woman. It is very significant that Le Pho chooses the rose that even the Kim Vân Kiêu of Nguyên Dû (1765-1820) and its three thousand verses do not mention once, when chrysanthemums, orchids, lotuses, tuberoses, apricot, peach and pomegranate flowers abound. Choice of a painter who, in the name of this flower imported to Vietnam during the colonial era, chooses a new homeland and remembers Stefan Lochner (circa 1410-1451) whose Madonna with the Rose Bush he admired at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in 1932.

A rustic barrier, a subtle flower, are a base for this woman with an assumed modernity, beautiful in its contrasts. All of Le Pho's themes are present in this subtle painting, magnificently served by the artist's choice of gouache pigments in more pastel tones than usual, which give this exceptional work its ethereal atmosphere, with translucent face and hands very rare in the work of the painter.

An incredible softness of being to which the painter will pay homage, tirelessly all his life.

Jean-François Hubert
Senior Expert, Art of Vietnam