Painting By Thai Tuan, The District Of Saigon, 1959.

Oil on hardboard, signed and dated lower left. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse. Size 58.5 cm x 42 cm. Sound paint layer. I note very slight losses, two chipped corners and two light scratches, without seriousness. This painting represents an old district of Saigon where refugees from North Vietnam were housed in 1954, after the Geneva Accords. Thaï Tuân and his painter friends from the "Group of Four" had settled there upon arrival, had worked there. It is there that he painted most of his first paintings. Provenance: collection of Henry T. Zaphiratos, famous French writer and director, director in Saigon until 1959 of the company "Thanos-Films". He met the artist at the 1959 exhibition and bought all the available paintings from him. A painting by Thaï Tuân, of the same size and from the same period (1954) went on sale at Sotheby's in Hong Kong on October 1, 2018. A great Vietnamese painter, Thaï Tuân created a vibrant body of work, full of nuances. Like his master Modigliani, he was inspired by the long faces and figures in the style of El Greco. Thaï Tuân studied at the Hanoi School of Fine Arts in the 1940s, then exhibited, notably in 1959, in Saigon with the Alliance Française in the salons of the famous Hôtel Continental.