John Swinbank

War shapes art and art shapes how war is remembered. In the crucible of conflict that engulfed the Indochina Peninsula from 1946 to 1975, Vietnamese combat art from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) emerged as a distinct genre — a unique synthesis of revolutionary propaganda, the raw immediacy of guerrilla warfare, and the accumulated influences of artistic traditions nurtured and passed down through a lineage of artists…

Art and politics are deeply entwined in the historical narrative of modern Vietnam, as are the artists and revolutionaries who shaped and told it. It is a captivating story of art and revolution, where artists—both teachers and students—played pivotal and interchanging roles as they negotiated the changing purpose of the seminal art institution: L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (The Indochina School of Fine Arts or EBAI), later the revolutionary ‘Resistance Class,’ then the College of Fine Arts, and now the Vietnam University of Fine Arts. This tale is entangled not only in the grand sweep of history but also in personal experiences and chance encounters...

There are few French personalities honoured or remembered affectionately in Vietnam today. Among the few are bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, co-discoverer of the cause of the plague, Yersinia pestis, and the painter Victor Tardieu (1870–1937), co-founder of the fine arts academy, l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine [The Fine Arts School of Indochina]. In 2016, both men were acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to the advancement of Vietnam.1 From his laboratory in Nha Trang, Yersin developed an anti-plague serum and laid the foundations of Vietnam’s billion-dollar rubber and coffee industries of today. In Hanoi, Tardieu’s academy gave birth to modern Vietnamese painting, and unwittingly the visual style of the Vietnamese revolutionary propaganda artform...