The Woman in Blue by Vũ Cao Đàm

by Nicolas Henni-Trịnh Đức

May 5, 2025

Vũ Cao Đàm (1908-2000), "La femme en bleu", c. 1933, Encre et gouache sur soie, 102 x 73 cm, estimation : 150 000€-200 000€, expertisé par Gauchet Art Asiatique pour la maison de vente aux enchère MILLON

Vũ Cao Đàm painted The Woman in Blue in 1933, shortly after moving to Paris. In 1931, he had attracted attention at the International Colonial Exhibition with his sculptures, which were widely acclaimed by the public and the press. This work, however, demonstrates that the young man was already an accomplished painter, worthy of the greatest portraitists. Here, he depicts an anonymous figure, not a specific individual. In a few strokes, he nevertheless demonstrates great sensitivity in the young woman's expression. As with his sculpture, the artist combines a desire to simplify forms with a contained but palpable emotion. The costume she wears indicates that she belongs to the Tày, an ethnic group living in northern Vietnam. The recent Colonial Exhibition and the popular rise of anthropology have sparked in the artist a new interest in the cultural diversity of his country. He interprets it in his own way with this painting: the clothing only evokes the Tày, without precision or details. As throughout his career, he rejects the descriptive accuracy of Orientalism in favor of a freer creative practice imbued with nostalgia.

The young woman stares resolutely at the observer, posing in a strict frontality not unlike ancestor portraits. This type of image is undoubtedly a model for Vũ Cao Đàm and he also adopts the neutral background that isolates the figure in space. Until the 1940s, the ancestor portrait was a reference that inspired various compositions. We know of examples depicting bust-length poets or full-length civil servants, like The Mandarin currently on display at the National Gallery of Singapore in the City of Others exhibition . His classmates at the Indochina School of Fine Arts shared this interest in this iconographic canon and collectors were seduced by this echo of art history. Vũ Cao Đàm was indeed passionate about art history and, while painting The Woman in Blue , he was enrolled at the École du Louvre where he took courses devoted to East Asian art. From this teaching he retained not only the serious and noble drawing of an art consecrated by rites, but also the patina of the ages as a sign of ancient preciousness. Applying the pigment with a dry brush, the weave of the silk on which he painted can be guessed and gives the painting this captivating effect of a timeless piece. Later in the century, it was to his sculpture that he would give this dimension of antiquity through research into materials and colors. With The Woman in Blue , Vũ Cao Đàm therefore delivers a deliberately ambiguous vision.

The artist did not date The Woman in Blue . In addition to a letter preserved in Victor Tardieu's archives mentioning its purchase by the director of the magazine l' Illustration at the beginning of 1934, it is the seal and signature he affixed at the bottom right that allow us to place its creation at the beginning of the 1930s. The deciphered seal is particularly interesting: it reads 南兒童印 [Seal of the son of the South] in a sigillary style. By synecdoche, Vũ Cao Đàm signs his work as Vietnamese. The south, 南Nam , refers to the name of the country: Đại Nam for the imperial court still in place, Annam for the colonial government or Việt Nam today. The artist is particularly fond of this seal and we know that he owns at least two slightly different copies. It is a poetic mark of his Vietnamese identity that he imprints in red while at twenty-five he begins a new stage of his life, thousands of kilometers from his native country. Similarly, his friend Mai Thứ will use a seal bearing the more explicit characters 大南枚栨 [Mai Thứ du Đại Nam] on paintings that he also produced shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1937. In conclusion, this painting by Vũ Cao Đàm is characteristic of his first French years, by its style and by the stylistic and personal reflections that it contains. Of an "original character", as the director of the Economic Agency of Indochina underlined in 1934, The Woman in Blue nevertheless remains unique, not only among the proposals of his contemporaries but also in the corpus of Vũ Cao Đàm himself.