Lê Thị Lựu

Biography

In the autumn of 1929, when classes resumed, Lê Thị Lựu had only one finished oil painting, “Children in a Banana Grove”. An hour before leaving for the station she persuaded her uncle to sit for her and took a second picture along, “Portrait of Mr Hai”, with the paint still wet. At the school exhibition on 15 November both paintings were bought, for 400 piastres together; a room in her boarding house cost her three.

She was born on 19 January 1911 in the village of Thổ Khối near Hanoi, the daughter of an official in the French colonial administration. Her father had a French education, yet he ordered his daughters to wear their hair long and blacken their teeth until they married. Her sisters went to a girls’ school; in 1926 Lựu took the entrance examinations of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine. She prepared on her own, from a single book on perspective. In the first year she was admitted only to the preparatory class: ten candidates were taken, and she came thirteenth. In 1927 she came first in the examination for the school’s third intake of students, at the age of sixteen.

At the school she was one of very few girls. Her family had to be persuaded to let her draw the nude male model. Her classmates resented her success, and one of them spoiled her drawings. She became friends with older students, Mai Trung Thứ, Lê Phổ and Vũ Cao Đàm, and with the school’s director, Victor Tardieu. In 1932 Lựu graduated first in her year, and no woman had done so before her.

Her work was shown at the Colonial Exhibitions in Paris in 1931 and 1933. The Vietnamese press wrote about her as the first woman graduate. The writer Nhất Linh named her one of the three best oil painters at the school. From 1933 she taught in Hanoi, at the Bưởi lycée (then the Protectorate Lycée), at the Đồng Khánh school and at the private Hồng Bàng school. In 1935–1936 she worked in Saigon and in Gia Định. Among her pupils is named the future painter Phan Kế An. She took part in the Scout movement and designed a Scout badge, and in 1939, together with Tô Ngọc Vân, she made stage sets for the theatre company of Thế Lữ.

In March 1940 Lựu sailed from Saigon with her husband, a civil servant who had been transferred to a post in France. In Paris her friends had already been called up into the army. During the war the family lived in Paris, Nantes and Nice, and then for several years in Guinea, where her husband had been appointed director of an experimental botanical garden. In those years she hardly painted: she had a small child and there was a shortage of materials. A portrait of a Guinean man from 1943 survives, drawn in pencil on wrapping paper.

After the war Lựu returned to Paris, and in 1946 she took part in Vietnamese community organisations in France. In 1956 her husband left to work in Vietnam.

She returned to painting in 1954. She went around museums and galleries, drew at the La Chaumière studio, and for several months attended the École du Louvre before leaving it: the programme gave her nothing. She chose silk. In 1959 three of her small works were shown at the annual exhibition of the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors; they were bought on the opening day, and she received the first prize and the rank of full member of the union. She painted mainly women and children, in soft blues, greens and pinks; she invented the faces and hardly ever worked from a model. It seems to me that the restraint of these pictures is best seen in the nude figures, which she painted modestly.

From 1962 she taught drawing at Parisian lycées, Corot, Rodin and Orsay. In 1971, after retiring, she settled in the south of France. She worked on “The Meeting of Kim and Kiều” from 1975 and in the 1980s still could not finish it. Her last work, “Three Generations Under One Roof”, was completed in 1988. Lựu died on 6 June 1988 in Antibes. She never held a solo exhibition, and how much she painted in all is unknown: estimates range from 250 to 500 works.