The Studio

The French artist Joseph Inguimberty was one of the first art teachers in Vietnam. He educated many Vietnamese artists at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indocine (Hanoi) where he taught for twenty years - from 1925, when the school was founded, until 1945 when the revolution ended and the country declared independence. Most of Inguimberty's paintings depict outdoor daily life and pastures with luxuriant vegetation. However, this painting is in line with the atelier type of art lessons in which the model posed nude for a class indoors. Two different images of the same model are presented in the painting: one dressed in traditional costume and another nude, posing in a manner that was typical in Western painting. Flower-and-bird ink painting scrolls were hung on the wall, while Western style picture frames for oil painting were rested against the wall. The juxtaposition of the sitting and the standing figures, the dressed figure and the nude, the hanging scrolls and the picture frames, ink painting and oil painting, etc., implied a contrast between the East (traditional art) and the West (modern art). The metaphorical approach employed here suggested the possibility of new modes of representation to Vietnamese artists. (RT)