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...

Even before the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was proclaimed and declared independent of France in 1945, the Việt Minh, the revolutionary organisation under the charismatic leadership of Hồ Chí Minh, began recruiting French-trained Vietnamese visual artists to produce visual communication materials, comprising posters, banners, billboards, murals, and other visual emblems of government.

The political and military strategies of the Vietnam wars are the stuff of legend and subject to a vast literature and endless debate. However, the political messages produced by the DRV to mobilise popular support for independence and a prolonged ‘people’s war’ against the superior military might of two world powers, France and the United States of America (USA), remain in the shadows, undervalued as shrill ideological artefacts or amusing kitsch souvenirs of communist propaganda.

In this thesis, I argue that DRV propaganda was a communist enterprise that drew on an amalgam of communist Sino-Soviet Marxist-Leninist styles, and a melange of other cultural influences, including Vietnamese literary traditions and French visual innovations. This ‘polyglot’ combination produced a vigorous cultural hybrid that was able to rise above party rhetoric and ‘speak’ to all Vietnamese in a ‘language’ they could understand.

I contend that the efficacy of DRV propaganda was enabled, inadvertently, by colonial cultural reforms in literacy and visual arts as part of the French civilising mission, which sought to promote colonial rule to the Vietnamese and French populations. Contrary to design, these cultural reforms produced startling consequences for the Vietnamese revolutionary project, including a national writing system, and, an expert cohort of artists, trained in the aesthetics and techniques of visual communication.

This thesis explores the cultural origins of DRV propaganda by considering the effects of those cultural reforms as vectors for Vietnamese nationalism, and, the motivations of the French colonial enterprise that propelled them. That cultural reform used as propaganda had unintended and perverse consequences for France’s imperial project is an enduring dialectical irony that Karl Marx himself might have found intriguing.