Jean Carzou, a famous French painter, once said: Cézanne’s apples, no matter how strange they are, cannot compare with Rembrandt’s Night watch. An artist’s stature does not depend on the genre, subject or motif that the artist represents. But indeed, painters who paint human images are still given priority in evaluation.
Artists often say: If you can draw people, you can draw everything. But no one has ever said: If you can draw landscapes or still lifes, you can draw everything.
Humans and human images seem to be the Creator’s fingerprints, from which humans can discover and infer all the most mysterious principles of the universe.
Trần Đông Lương. Young woman. 1957. 40×50 cm. Nguyễn Phi Hùng Collection, Hà Nội
In our country, ancient folk master artists could carve extremely beautiful human figures, very “wrong” in anatomy, but absolutely correct in spirit. The special difference between them and scholarly artists might be that they created without having to look at anything.
Today, the modern Vietnamese artists who are best at drawing figures, especially human figures, seem to be the artists who have more or less inherited that special genetic code from our ancestors.
… Regarding drawing talent, in the Resistance Class (1950-1954), there were at least three artists: Lưu Công Nhân, Trọng Kiệm and Trần Đông Lương.
While studying in Việt Bắc, Trần Đông Lương drew pictures so skillfully that some artists mistook his drawings for those of master Tô Ngọc Vân.
Trần Đông Lương’s drawing, in many aspects, are Western academic drawings with French characteristics, following a tradition that extended from classical Raphael – Italy, through Poussin, Ingres, Daumier, Renoir, Degas – France, of which Balthus might have been the most recent representative.
Trần Đông Lương’s drawing has both Trọng Kiệm’s solidity and Lưu Công Nhân’s “flying” attitude. The only difference is that his performance is more stable than Lưu Công Nhân and Trọng Kiệm. Or to put it another way, there are few sudden changes in Trần Đông Lương, and that is actually one of his strengths.
There are artists who, on the outside, seem to have not changed at all, seemingly “standing still”, but in the end, the inner richness of their “vocabulary” (not “grammar”) are actually remarkable achievements.
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In theory, people divide drawings into two basic genres: line drawings (of which Matisse was a genius) and light and dark drawings, between which there is also a combined genre called intermediate drawings (dessin intermediae). Light and dark drawings are divided into white drawings (little contrast, of which Ingres could be considered the most outstanding representative) and black drawings (strong contrast, whose modern representatives can be Daumier, Seurat). There is an extremely special exception, Van Gogh made light and dark drawings, but he made it with lines, dots and lines, called calligraphic drawings. Nguyễn Gia Trí is very good at line drawings and black and white drawings, depending on his need for expression or to retrieve materials.
The line drawings of Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm, Nguyễn Sáng, Bùi Xuân Phái, Lưu Công Nhân are especially good, so good that we used to have the notion that only line drawings are worthy of being called quintessential, intellectual and really creative. But that does not mean that light and dark drawings, such as that of Trần Đông Lương, lose their original position.
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Basically, Trần Đông Lương was a silk painting artist. And, in just one year – 1958, he created three works that best represent his style: Labor Hero – Doctor Phạm Ngọc Thạch (Việt Nam Fine Arts Museum), Embroidery team (Việt Nam Fine Arts Museum) and Youth (National Museum of the Arts of the Eastern Countries, Russian Federation). What’s special about him is his unusual ability in the art of transforming “pure” images meticulously prepared on “paper” onto a “silk” background, and thanks to that, they truly become beautiful works.
“… Among young artists, there are people like Trần Đông Lương who follow the example of artist Nguyễn Phan Chánh, specializing in silk painting but with a completely different style. Thanks to his strong drawing skills, Trần Đông Lương’s silk paintings have reasonable shapes, clear light while still maintaining the smooth shape of silk. The painting of Labor Hero Phạm Ngọc Thạch is a success for the artist.” (Nguyễn Phi Hoanh, “Fine Arts of Việt Nam”, published in 1984)
Thus, it can be said that in Trần Đông Lương’s art, drawings have a decisive role, being the soul and essence of his works.
Trần Đông Lương is also one of the artists who developed the art of silk painting based on light and dark drawings, a basic style of silk painting that has become a tradition since Nguyễn Phan Chánh, and possibly until the 1960s and 1970s, the “radical” drawing language of woodcut art had a significant impact on the art of silk painting.
Mentioning Trần Đông Lương also means mentioning an artist who specializes in drawing young women, especially urban and young women of Hà Nội. At first glance, the style of drawing young women seems to be academic in nature, associated with models. But in fact, influenced by emotions, Trần Đông Lương often drew “more” subjectively, and sometimes seems to “not look” at all, just according to feeling, according to some kind of formal logic, as long as the artwork achieved an idea, an effect, sometimes quite metaphysical that people still call it “illusory”.
Trần Đông Lương’s drawings of young women introduced here belong to two periods quite a long time apart, some was created just a short time before he fell ill and after that he could only draw with his left hand, especially including line drawings. Although not truly representative, these drawings still give us an image of one of the master drawing styles, the drawing style of Trần Đông Lương.
Written by art critic Quang Việt
