Square – Capri (1933)

Signed and dated lower right: ‘Capri 1933 Lêvandê’

On the reverse: label from the Galleria Pesaro

Exhibitions: Milan, Galleria Pesaro, 1934

A key figure in Vietnamese modern art, Lê Van Dê, after obtaining a scholarship in Paris in 1932, quickly made a name for himself on the international scene in France and Italy, receiving prestigious institutional and critical recognition: he was the first Vietnamese painter to be received in audience by the Pope in Rome. Although Paris was a fundamental starting point for him, it was Italy that exerted a profound and lasting attraction on Lê Van Dê. In 1936, the Vatican commissioned him to supervise the creation and decoration of the Asian arts section of the Vatican Exhibition, an opportunity that allowed him to further his study of the Vatican Museums’ collections. But already in the early 1930s, a prolonged stay in Capri marked a decisive phase in his research, evidenced by a significant collection of landscapes, portraits and scenes of life – executed between Italy and Vietnam – presented in 1934 at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan.In the same year, he participated in the International Exhibition of Colonial Art in Naples with The Family Interior in Tonkin, a painting from 1933 also exhibited in Milan, which introduced the distinctive features of his pictorial language during his Italian years.

A soft palette and a delicate two-dimensionality, entirely Eastern in style, in which everyday anecdotes are narrated with elegance and serenity, with a temporal suspension that refers to a graceful rituality and is reflected above all in scenes of family intimacy or motherhood. In the exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in 1934, where he presented more than a hundred works including oils, drawings and woodcuts, Lê Van Dê also presented a series of landscapes and scenes from Rome and Capri, including Square – Capri, painted in 1933, as can be seen from the characteristic bilingual signature in the lower right-hand corner, with the addition of a red stamp, typical of early 20th-century Asian artists.

“After a brief stint in Paris, he is now in Italy, intent on reconciling his Eastern thinking with what he sees here; here he is, portraying aspects of Capri and its luminous atmosphere”, reads the contemporary press coverage of the Milan exhibition. The work, dedicated to the small square in Capri, with its clock tower and panoramic terrace overlooking the sea, is influenced by the severe geometries of Italian landscape painting of the 1930s and takes the form of a suspended, silent space in which time seems to rarefy until it almost dissolves. The compositional harmony and the soft, vibrant colours lead the image almost towards a dreamlike dimension, similar in some respects to the landscapes of Antonio Donghi, pervaded by metaphysical silence, while maintaining a strong link with the linear simplicity of the graphic tradition of the Far East. In this subtle balance, Lê Van Dê manages to portray Capri while also evoking the maritime atmosphere of colonial-era Vietnam, a country rife with political tensions but ready to open up to the world. During this European phase, the artist experimented with the technique of oil on canvas, but upon his return to Vietnam in the 1940s, he gradually favoured ink and gouache on silk for paintings full of grace and melancholy.

These aspects are also present in the works created in Italy: Piazza di Capri, as well as the pendant paintings Winter in Capri, encapsulate that ethereal harmony, made up of full but delicate volumes, light and clear colours, and silent figures intent on their daily activities, in which the painter seems to nostalgically recognise certain traits in common with the people of South Vietnam. This work thus takes shape as a place of convergence between artistic traditions that are only apparently distant. Its intensity stems precisely from this synthesis, in which different languages, sensibilities and cultural references merge in an unexpected and personal balance.