Mai Thrung Thu - Signed IN PLATE & Numbered Lithograph
Framed under Glass (50cm wide 87cm length)
Vietnamese Artist
Mai Trung Thu (Vietnamese / French, 1906-1980). Lithograph "Le Tet III", depicting six children and a mother with flowers in a blue and white bowl on stand. Signed in plate lower right and with artist seal.
Opportunity to purchase a signed in plate, Mai Thu lithograph. Usually only found at some of the high end auction houses, the original paintings, lithographs, and prints sell for very high prices. An original Mai Thu painting can sell for $50,000 or more. Lithographs can sell for $10,000 or more.
The artist Mai Thu expresses the essence of what can be appropriately hailed as "Ecole Franco-Vietnamese" (The School of French-Vietnamese Art) of Paris. Alongside his painter friends Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam, whom he met at the L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi from the years 1925-1926, they shared a sameness of purpose, the fighting spirit of the exile, which characterized a generation of Vietnamese artists at the beginning of the 1930s. For them, serving their art and promoting Vietnamese painting required a pilgrimage to Paris, France which was at that time the world capital of art. The divisions of Montmartre and Montparnasse were where the great painters, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and others flourished; additionally the French authorities were exercising the impetus to extend "the colonial enterprise" by attracting young Vietnamese artists to the capital. The opportunity provided by the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, for example, grew to become an absolutely fascinating tour of the West for Mai Thu and his compatriots. Vu Cao Dam and Le Pho arrived early in 1931, followed closely by Mai Thu. Vu Cao Dam never returned to live in Vietnam and had permanently relocated to France by 1937. Mai Thu also migrated in the same year. The trio of artists, bound by a strong friendship, augmented their essential roles in Vietnamese painting within the first half of the twentieth century. Another schism occurred with the end of fine art education at the Hanoi academy and engendered a different fate for those who remained behind in Vietnam: Nguyen Phan Chanh, Toc Ngoc Van, Nguyen Gia Tri and other schoolmates. Contrasting the nationalism and inter-nationalism of the two different groups, the constant dialectic between those who left the country and those who remained is the cornerstone for understanding the Vietnamese pictorial art of the twentieth century.
