Modernism from the Mekong
"Vietnam Behind the Lines" is the most surprising show of the
year, a collection of paintings and drawings of that devastating
war never before shown in the West. Anyone who thinks they
have seen it all, in films and photographs, documentaries and
art, should get along to the British Museum. Of all the billions of
images, the only ones never witnessed outside the field of
conflict - then or since - were those made by the Vietcong
themselves.
While the West was watching the living-room war on TV, or
switching over to the solace of The Waltons, the artists of North
Vietnam were simultaneously fighting and recording the war for
posterity. Communist Vietnam seems to have had no concept of
the official war artist, sketching the scene from the trenches. All
of the named artists in this show were soldiers, many of them
veterans of the Tet Offensive. Untold others died or disappeared,
leaving only their anonymous sketches. There are paintings
here, especially those of the Long Bien bridge, that were made
during B-52 bombardments. Unlike the bridge, rebuilt and
destroyed over and again, these fragile creations somehow
lasted.
Drawings were made in dugouts, in caves, in bamboo huts, from
the branches of trees in the forest. Ink and chalk survived the
terrible humidity pretty well. Better still, Biros were donated by
the allies. But most of these images were rapidly drawn in pencil
on paper and although there are some delicate watercolours - a
lyrical painting of soldiers lugging rice through the dappled green
light of the jungle - almost everything is conveyed in black and
white.
A blasted heath that looks like a Paul Nash drawing
summarises the effects of Agent Orange. Soldiers trudge
through a napalmed glade, their only cover a few bare trees
raising their charred fingers to the heavens. There are
wonderfully concise pen-and-ink drawings of peasants
transporting the wrecked fuselage of a US bomber on a cart
drawn by a placid buffalo, and of off-duty troops chatting, dealing
cards, listening to the radio, playing music on bamboo
xylophones.
Gradually, you begin to distinguish the defining touch of certain
artists. Nguyen Thu's elegant calligraphy of scimitar swipes and
curves, very nearly abstract. Quang Tho's deft pointillism - the
jungle delicately indicated in a few pencil-point dots. Van Da's
sinuous outlines and simplified forms, so reminiscent of
Matisse.
All of which is something of a revelation. For who would have
thought that so much classic modernism would have found a
new life in the figurative art of this war-ravaged Asian nation?
But as for the war itself, you never see its murderous atrocities.
There are no images of violence, of raids or excursions. There
are no prisoners of war, bar a painting from the earlier
Franco-Viet conflict. Despite the fact that so many millions were
wounded or died, there isn't a single maimed body or corpse.
Some of the surviving artists, interviewed in the catalogue,
explain that their art was for the living and that destruction was
there for the cameras. But it seems far more likely that they
were taking their war-effort orders directly from Uncle Ho.
Long before the Vietnam War began, the Fine Arts College in
Hanoi, where many of these artists trained, was dedicated to
Soviet-style socialist realism. The painting of nudes and
abstracts was banned. All the direct connections with French
modernism were severed. Artists taught by Vietnamese tutors
who had studied in the studios of Paris were required to work for
the republican cause, making wood-block prints and two-colour
posters.
So there are posters here of tanks being transmuted into
tractors, of proud mothers holding up their babies to skylines of
chimneys: the glorious future of factory production. And there
are plenty of images of Ho Chi Minh himself, bearded and
smiling, the avuncular overseer of children's lessons or the
encouraging beacon for processions of soldiers.
Yet he is never quite as mass-produced and depersonalised as
Stalin or Chairman Mao. Although the Vietcong artists
presumably never met their leader, there is some attempt to
make him more of a man and less of an icon. In one poster, he
is drawn as a casual ink sketch, tousled and not a little furrowed
as he pauses, mid discussion. It is a powerful portrait, so much
so that you see it in other paintings, strung between trees in the
ad hoc exhibitions held in the jungle.
Some of the works in this show are as crude as any other
propaganda. But there is humour here - two soldiers fleeing the
temptation of Philip Morris cigarettes; a peasant woman in a
jaunty polka-dot scarf bearing down on an US pilot who looks
like a bewildered Martian, with his green face and silver helmet.
What was banned, moreover, seems to steal its way back into
so many of the pictures. Into Quang Tho's painting of soldiers in
camouflage capes and combat dress pinned in their frieze of
movement like Lautrec's dancers at the Moulin Rouge. Into
Nguyen Tho's exquisite pencil drawing of the border between
North and South, an image somewhere between Van Gogh and
a Japanese watercolour.
If this extraordinary show had been mounted in the Tate or the
Hayward, say, there would have been money for better lighting
and a lot more context. We might have seen the rapid portraits
these artists drew of their fellow soldiers, final mementos for
their mothers back home. We would probably have seen the art
of South Vietnam, by contrast; perhaps even protest painting
from America, such as James Rosenquist's immemorial F-11.
On the other hand, this show might never have been possible in
the first place. For these images have been slowly, patiently
gathered in difficult conditions over many years and now belong
to the British Museum.
"Vietnam Behind the Lines" - British Museum, London WC1,until 1 December
By Laura Cumming - The Observer - August 04, 2002.
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