Nguyễn Gia Trí

Biography

Cartoons mocking the French colonial administration and the officials who served it appeared in the magazines Phong Hóa and Ngày Nay under the pseudonym Raitơ (Right). The author was Nguyễn Gia Trí, and this is one of the earliest works known from his hand.

He was born in 1908 in the village of Trường Yên in Chương Mỹ district, Hà Tây province (now part of Hanoi). From 1932 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, the colonial art school; by some accounts he graduated in 1936. The start of his work for Phong Hóa and Ngày Nay also dates from 1932; there he worked alongside the writer Nhất Linh and other writers and artists. For these magazines he invented the characters Xã Xệ and Bang Bạnh, and he reworked the character Lý Toét, created by Nhất Linh. Besides cartoons, he made colour woodcuts in a folk manner, as well as book and newspaper illustrations.

In the late 1930s, together with Nguyễn Tường Tam, Nhất Linh, Khái Hưng and others, he took part in founding a political party, the Đại Việt Dân Chính Đảng. For his political activity the French authorities exiled him to Sơn La. The details and dates of the exile are hard to establish.

His first paintings, for example “Sunset on the River” and “Landscape of Móng Cái”, were painted under the influence of European realism and Impressionism. Then he concentrated on lacquer. Between 1939 and 1945 he produced a very large number of works on panels, screens and doors, surrounding himself with a team of lacquer craftsmen. “Rural Scene” (1939) and “Young Woman by a Hibiscus Bush” (1944) date from this time. A familiar subject of the 1940s: graceful girls strolling idly through a poetic landscape. He worked with red lacquer, charcoal lacquer, gold, silver and eggshell. As a result, lacquer turned from a decorative craft into painting in its own right. A contemporary, the painter Tô Ngọc Vân, wrote that after Nguyễn Gia Trí’s experiments lacquer work was no longer an applied art.

Among his works are also named “Standing Screen” and “North Central South Spring Garden”; the dates of their creation are unclear.

From 1946 to 1951 he lived in Hong Kong. In 1954 he moved to the south, to Saigon. From 1966 he made lacquer pictures of an abstract character, and in the 1960s and 1970s his manner leaned toward abstraction. Toward the end of his life he returned to the romantic world of the 1940s.

His pictures were eagerly collected by the French, and later by wealthy collectors in Saigon. According to stories, he often left commissions unfinished and sold his canvases by length, by the span of a hand. He is credited with the words: “I create with my soul.”

Nguyễn Gia Trí died on 20 June 1993 in Ho Chi Minh City. His works have been designated a national treasure of Vietnam, and taking them out of the country is forbidden. In 2012 he was posthumously awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize, the state prize. There are streets named after him in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Đồng Hới.