The work of Le Pho is not a compromise between Vietnamese art, of Chinese origin, and Western art. It is a fusion of two mentalities, two worlds and two continents.

Does this mean that these worlds are so categorically opposed as the art historians assert ? From the height of the Middle Ages, the Romanesque sculpture of Normandy underwent the attraction of the bestiaries of Asia. emphasis has been laid on the direct and indirect relations between the landscapes of the European North, those visions of phantasy, and the Chinese nature pictures. Oswald Siren thinks that the painting of Hia-Kouai are akin to Rembrandt's drawings. But it was impressionism in particular which was to reveal the links which exist between two forms of expression which are, at least apparently, in contradiction with each other. Degas and Lautrec discovered the masters of the Japanese print, Outamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshigé. Their tendency to fix the successive states of movement, their asymmetrical placing and their snapshots are prefigured by the drawings of the Ukiyo-E school, just as Monet's diaphanous Nympheas are foreshadowed by the Chinese scribes, landscape painters, calligraphers and poets, of whom the Japanese are the epigonoi.

Like the nebulous mirages oj the Song painters, the views of the Giverny water garden have no fixed point or measurable distance, no horizon line or trace of perspective. Water, land and sky all merge. Extent of space is the only argument of the picture. World art is made up of these exchanges.

Le Pho was born in 1907 in North Vietnam. He was very early attracted to the arts. The Hanoi School opened its doors to him in 1925. This School was created by the French painter, Victor Tardieu, the boyhood friend of Rouault and Matisse. Awarded the Grand Prix of Indochina, Tardieu had been at Hanoi since 1920. This guiding spirit, from whom the arts of Asia withheld no secret, discovered on the spot a number of young artists, eager to learn. The city lacked a school where they could acquire technical knowledge and an authentic oesthetic culture. Tardieu laid the foundations. This was to be a School unlike any other.

By their purely European orientation, the Academies founded by England in its Indian Empire had completely corrupted Indian art. Victor Tardieu, on the contrary, preserved the personality of the Vietnamese artists. The models set before the students were not the frescoes of Michael Angela or Phidias or Scopas. The Principal insisted that his disciples should go back to the sources, without escaping from their own generation.

Le Pho studied at the Hanoi School for five years and then left for France with the aid of a Government Scholarship. In Paris, where he joined the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the official teaching threw him off balance. When he set off for Italy, where he was to made a long stay, he was disconcerted. At Fiesole, when Fra Angelico's convent still stands, he painted a landscape more akin to the genre of his Paris masters than to an art of which he is the lawful heir. It was in visiting the Museums of Florence, and going on pilgrimage to Bruges, after a halt at Cologne, that he seems to have regained mastery of himself. It was before the masterpieces of Fouquet and the Master of Moulins, which he had admired both in Paris and in the Provinces, of Sandro Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, of Memling and Stefan Lochner, that he realised what was the Milky Way for him. He recognised indeed that the French and Italian, Flemish and Germanic Primitives are the distant brothers of those painters of old China...

In 1932, Le Pho went back to Hanoi. In 1934 he went to Pekin, where he visited the public galleries, the National Museum, the Museum of the Palace and where art-lovers threw their collections open to him. Chinese painting was no Ionger to hold any mystery for this studious and ardent young man. In 1937, Le Pho settled in France.

Up to 1943 or 1944, Le Pho practised an art which was Chinese in expression and which drew upon the past. He painted in water-color on silk or paper. His expert hand is alert and docile. His brushes are fine and narrow, or take on the aspect of little brooms. His touch is delicate, sensitive and vibrant. His works are like silent poems. Like his forbears, when he cannot express himself in verse, Le Pho resorts to colours and lines. He defines form by elliptical signs.

Like the Tcha'n painters, Le Pho looks at nature with dzzled eyes. He brings to light the inwardness of things through their unstable and fugitive aspects. His themes are sometimes the humblest of the Lord's creatures: bamboo branches, birds perching on a bush, a Mandarin duck swimming on a pond, or lotus blossoms. But these motifs are transfigured. The artist impregnates them with an elixir of life and makes them parcel of the universal soul.

Such works suggest that moral calm and ideal peace which are propitious to contemplation. The colour values are fluid. They evoke the aerial atmosphere rather than translate it.

Some of Le Pho's figures, Girl with Carnation, Girl with Orchid, have the hieratic and gracious elegance, the design and the extreme refinement of certain masterpieces of the Quattrocento. They reveal a civilisation which is an art of living and a courtly idea of love. Is not courtly love, "L'amour courtois", one of the finest conquests of French chivalry in its declining days and of China of the philosophic, esthetic and erudite Emperors ?

Like the figures of the Gothic iwagists, the figures of Le Pho convey no sensation of weight, no sensation of effort or volume. They are reduced to their essential beauty. Their line is continuous. They are no doubt more imaginary than real and belong to a faery world. At the risk of repetition, we may say that they join hands both with the Madonnas of the Rhenish Master of the Life of Mary and with the Melisande and the Princesse Malaine of Maurice Maeterlinck. These Sleeping Beauties dwell in sacred woods. Living symbols of womanhood, they remain immaterial. To render their sophisticated charm one would have to be master of the rare epithets of the poets of the decadence.

In 1940, Le Pho, this descendant of the illustrious Yen Li-Pen, painted, strange as it may seem, Descents from the Cross and Nativities of a medievalism which bears the indelible imprint of the Pre-raphaelites, of Gauguin and of Paul Sérusier. Compassionate mothers caressing their child turn into virgin mothers, their heads haloed with an aureole. This unaccustomed blending of Christian art and art devoted to the cult of Buddha cannot fail to recall the Gothic-Buddhist art of Central Asia. (The Afghanistan stuccoes of the third and fourth centuries.)

Le Pho's nudes are free from eroticism. They remain chaste. They are the bodies of young half-grown girls, with forms as elastic as reeds. Small ivory-skinned nymphs sport in the lustral waters of a lake, seek the shade of a cherry tree, or dream under the clear cold light of the moon. Their silkclad Duennas embroider or prepare the tea.

Le Pho freely paraphrases the Siennese, but his points of reference are no less the Dancing Women of the Boston Museum (Han period) and the aristocratic Monitress Writing before two ladies of the Imperial Court, by that prince of painters, Ku-Kai-Tche.

Le Pho's traditional period did not come to an end until 1944-45. The romantic period followed. It betrays a crisis of growth. Stylised figures are outlined against the background of a blasted heath, slightly indistinct, shadowy and opaque. Landscape and figures act separately. These two elements of the picture are imperfectly attuned.

From 1950 onwards, Le Pho's palette becomes lighter. The painter adopts the manner of the sketch, or rather of the outline (Chou). His pictures are "boneless". They have no linear scaffolding. Contact with Bonnard's work played a decisive role in the evolution of the Eurasian artist. Le Pho began to paint in oils on canvas. He achieved a harmonious synthesis between Chinese painting and Impressionism, or rather Post-Impressionism. If he retains his nostalgia for the country of a thousand flowers, if his figures are modelled from the same stuff as the air which envelopes them and blurs their outlines, if he devotes himself to translating light, that soul of all painting, he never ceases to be himself. His brush strokes are much more apparent than they used to be. They are more vigorous and more irregular. The artist is seeking for unity. The torsos of his Naiads and the waves which lap them form part of the same plastic system. But the major data scarcely vary. A boat glides among the water lilies. Diaphanous girls gather fruit in a radiant Garden of Eden. Their gestures are slow. They are ceremonious and imprinted with gentleness. If their expressions convey no thought, the joy of living emanates from their whole being. Washer-girls kneeling in the running water alternate with musicians plucking the strings of a lute. In a climate of eternal spring frail adolescent girls lunch on a terrace. Fruit dishes loaded with peaches and pomegranates stand side by side, on their linen covered table, with vases of wild chrysanthemums.

Le Pho's world is an earthly paradise. The huma-nity which animates it has lost the sense of death and the sense of sin. A Ceres with a somewhat enigmatic smile and almond eyes gathers a bunch of iris with an amethyst tone. A siren from the flat shores of the Red River cleaves the waves of the Marne. A divinity of the fields and orchards who is a celestial girl wanders through a rose garden. Climbing plants partly dissim-ulate the flexible and undulating silhouette of a priestess escaped from a pagoda which dates from the age of the Three Kingdoms and the Six Dynasties.

Le Pho's flower paintings spontaneously transform the most commonplace dwelling into a house of enchantment. In some cases these flowers taken from nature give place to flowers sprung from some astral dream. One thinks of the fabulous plants of Redon.

In his still lifes Le Pho respects the flat rhythm of the wall. Is this rhythm merely a simple stylistic formula? We can discern the heredity of the painter, and a forcefully formulated will to art. A kakemono (or a makemono) is not a projection of reality. It is subject to its own special rules.

The keyboard of Le Pho's colours is a polychrome which dispenses lightness. The basic tones are the jade greens and Veronese greens, amber yellows and pale tortoise-shell yellows, ultramarine and turquoise blues, coral pinks, purples and carmines.

The Flower-girl, one of the painter's most recent works, is a symphony of chrome yellows and golds. The Girl in Blue raising her arms is outlined against a sky of crushed topaz.

To sum up. Le Pho accepts the lesson of Bonnard only because this French painter, whose freshness of visual perception and gift of marvelling childhood he has now made his own, was, especially at the end of his life "a Chinaman lost in Paris" (i). We may cite his living rooms, or dining rooms, ordered in registers or planes, superimposed, with no depth. We may also cite a bathroom drenched in sunlight. We can discern the luminous phantom of a woman lying in the water. Like certain Chinese interiors, these canvases, which are probably the summits of Bonnard, have two dimensions...

The roads of Asia and Europe cross. Eastern art and Western art once again open a fraternal dialogue.

(i) Baudelaire described Ingres as a Chinaman lost in Athens...
(Translated from the French by Noel Lindsay.)