Description
This book, created and written by Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier, an expert in modern Asian art, is the first to summarize the role of the Indochina School of Fine Arts in artistic creation. It appears on the eve of the centenary of this institution, a veritable link between East and West.
The author shares the fruits of ten years of research and expertise on the genesis of modern Vietnamese art, and opens the doors of numerous private collections and museum reserves…. Over 432 pages, it highlights the School’s contribution to international art history. It describes the role of the institution’s key players, recounts the high points between 1925 and 1945, and presents the exhibitions organized during this period in Hanoi, Saigon and Paris, as well as their critical reception. Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier also provides synthetic biographies of a selection of 28 key figures from this period, both students and teachers.
The expert sets out to explain the decisive stages in the emergence of the artistic elite that Tardieu wanted. She removes many of the grey areas that have masked the richness and artistic importance of this period in Indochina until now. 319 illustrations and numerous archival documents support her argument.
«This in-depth work to promote the work of these artists is such that the mention of their names is finally being noticed by a wider public. Thanks to this well-deserved spotlight, institutional exhibitions are being organized to support this momentum.» Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier, L’Art moderne en Indochine, In Fine éditions d’art, 2023, p. 18.
The players in this publishing project
L’art moderne en Indochine shows how the art market is enriching art history and helping to advance research into a school that has been forgotten for too long.
The author has chaired the Artistes d’Asie à Paris since 2019. Within the association (an organization of general cultural interest), Charlotte Aguttes-Reynier strives to highlight and document various facets of modern Asian art, and more specifically to catalogue the work of artist Mai Trung Thứ, that of Lê Phô and that of Vũ Cao Đàm. At auction house Aguttes, since 2014 she has devoted herself to the work of artists who benefited from dual training in China/France or Vietnam/France at the beginning of the 20th century. She joined her family’s eponymous company in 1996, specializing in modern art from 2000 and accompanying the development of the Classical Arts division. From 2013, she turned her attention to promoting the work of Asian artists. Ten years on, she has honored some 70 of them, and examined and auctioned over 1,000 paintings, drawings, lacquers and sculptures by them.
The publisher, In Fine éditions d’art, publishes art books and exhibition catalogs. It is part of the Société française de Promotion Artistique – SFPA (publisher of Connaissance des Arts and In Fine éditions d’art), a subsidiary of the Les Échos – Le Parisien, press group, the media arm of the LVMH Group.