Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000) Mother and Child, 1957

A young mother in a white áo dài holds her child, dressed in pale pink, against a ground of shimmering blue, turquoise and silver-grey. Both faces are turned a little away from us: the mother’s long, almond-eyed, with the rounded brow and small red mouth that Vu Cao Dam gave his women from the 1930s onwards; the child’s round and alert, looking out over her shoulder. In the upper left, small and far away, a horseman in red rides a dark horse across the haze, the cavalier who crosses so many of the artist’s canvases of these years like a memory of the Vietnamese legends he grew up with.

Painted in 1957, the picture belongs to the decade in which Vu Cao Dam, settled in the south of France since 1949 and from 1952 in Vence, near Chagall, gave up silk for oil. The surface shows what that change made possible: the paint is laid on thickly and worked in every direction, scratched and dragged so that the ground glitters through it, and the figures emerge from the atmosphere rather than standing in front of it. The palette of cool blues warmed by touches of ochre and rose is the one that made his work of the 1950s immediately recognisable at Galerie Romanet in Paris and, from 1963, at Wally Findlay Galleries in New York and Chicago.

The mother and child is the theme to which the artist returned most often, in bronze and in paint, and the version offered here brings together its two essential moods: the tenderness of the embrace and the quiet distance of the two figures, who look past each other into the blue. At 60 by 80 centimetres it is a substantial canvas for the period, and it comes to auction from a private collection in Paris, where the present owner acquired it in 2020.