Chorley’s Auctioneers is to offer a human insight into the realities of war, through a collection of rare sketches by the Vietnamese artist Pham Thanh Tam (1932-2019), in its upcoming sale of Modern Art & Design on Tuesday, 21st November 2023.
While the subject of war is at the forefront of everybody’s minds, Pham Thanh Tam expressed his inner conflicts with fighting and the feelings around it, through art. He sought to capture the realism and atrocities of his personal experience of war, alongside the humanity and every day life within it.
Commenting on the collection, the current owner:
“As a long term expat in Saigon I was fascinated in the history and art of the country and started collecting Vietnamese art. I was captivated by Tam’s rapid fluidity of sketching in the most adverse conditions, and how it caught that moment in time.”
Born into a revolutionary family, Tam joined the revolutionary cause as a teenager, when he joined up for the August Revolution, launched by the Việt Minh – League for the Independence of Vietnam.
This was finally granted to Vietnam in 1945 when the French, having lost control to the Japanese in French Indochina were given independence by Imperial Japan. When the French colonial army threatened Hanoi a year later in 1946, Tam and his family were forced to live on an army base in military zone 3, as his father was in the communist troop, the Việt Minh, continually advocating for Vietnam’s independence.
During this time Tam joined the propaganda painting division, which was his first exposure into using art to express feeling. The division exhibited three times up until 1948, when Tam attended a six-month painting course in the jungle. Here he created wall paintings celebrating the resistance movement, aimed at intimidating French military units based nearby. This led to his appointment in the Culture and Information Office in Hưng Yên Province and would begin a lifelong passion for art.
In 1950 he joined the resistance army where he would serve, not just as a soldier, but as an official war reporter and artist, working for the Quyết Thắng newspaper. In 1954 Tam participated in the first Indochina War, The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ against the French. Living on the front line he wrote reports and drew sketches of what he saw. The drawings won him third place in the National Art Exhibition of 1954. He continued his art training at Vietnam Fine Arts College and was granted leave to take part in the Second Indochina War, again as a war artist and journalist reporting for the Military Image Newspaper (Hình Ảnh Quân Đội), the Military Art Newspaper (Văn Nghệ Quân Đội) and the People’s Army Newspaper (Quân Đội Nhân Dân) up until 1963. He wrote and painted from the battlefields along the Ho Chi Minh trail, in Khe Sanh, Quảng Trị and Hạ Long Bay, during the 1972 Christmas Bombings, in Đà Nắng and during the Fall of Saigon.
While working under very difficult circumstances Tam was able to save the majority of his paintings and sketches by sending them back to Hanoi for safekeeping.
Chorley’s Director, Werner Freundel:
“Tam’s impressionistic artworks, drawn from life in the battlefield and Vietnamese camps, capture the realities of war and intimate snapshots of daily life on the battlefield. They are hardly ever seen at auction, making these exceptionally rare.”
Tam was the founding member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association in 1957 and was later recognised for his exceptional contribution to Vietnamese art, by being appointed the Director of the Military Fine Arts Workshop (later merged into the Military Museum) in 1978. While in this post he held art exhibitions and taught fine art. In 1989 having retired from the army at the rank of Colonel, he moved to Ho Chi Minh City, devoting his time to creating images reminiscent of his life during the resistance wars from his frontline sketches, using his signature materials: oils, silk, watercolour, pencil and pen. His diary entries from the latter part of his life and an array of sketches were collated in the book Drawing Under Fire: War Diary of a Young Vietnamese Artist, published in 2005. He is considered one of the most important Vietnamese artists of his time.
