A man of many talents, Le Pho was a Vietnamese artist who traveled the world painting, teaching, and performing his one-man show. As a young student who received formal training at Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi for four years before transferring to the corresponding school in Paris where he remained for another two years.
He spent several years working as a teacher at Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi, but then gave it up to return to Paris. It was shortly after returning to Europe that Pho really started to enter the public eye and became a star in the artistic community. Here is a brief overview of the importance of Pho’s work and why it has made such a lasting impact on the art world that even decades after his death his art is still in high demand at auction houses in Fort Lauderdale and other parts of the world.
Establishing Himself
Pho didn’t really begin to make significant waves in the world of art until he returned to Paris as a delegate for the International Exposition in 1937. The next year he hosted his first one-man show and was soon performing it all over the world after word spread about his talent. It wasn’t long before Pho began forming close relationships with some massively popular art galleries, and his work has since been featured in multiple exhibitions all around the world.
Signature Styles
Pho covered a variety of topics throughout his career, but his catalog of works can often be split into three separate groups. The first of these groups was developed while he was living in Vietnam. These artworks feature images of Vietnamese countrysides and often included womanly figures in the scenes.
The second style, prominently known as the Romanet period, featured much darker imagery of war and civil unrest. This gave his works a lot more narrative to them and employed a shift is his preferred color palette.
The third style saw a return to his artistic roots and was close to the artworks produced in the first part of his career. They featured warmer images and returned to something similar to his standard color palette. Works from this period also employed the use of oils on canvases, which was something that Pho had left largely unexplored up until that point in his career.
The majority of his images used a lot of warm colors and had an unusual texture to them due to his early preference for painting on silk. This allowed him to craft a very delicate painting process which was extremely hard to replicate for other artists who had done the majority of their work on standard canvases. The common themes found in most of his work are the presence of Vietnamese women, flowers, and landscapes.
