Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000) - Mother and Child, 1957

Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000) | Vietnamese Mother and Child, 1957 Oil on Canvas Signed: Signed and dated ‘vu cao dam 57’ (lower left). Dimensions: Artwork: 60 × 80 cm | 23.6 × 31.5 in Provenance: Private Collection, Paris. Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2020. Condition: Good condition overall. The paint layer, built up in dense impasto and scratched textures, is complete and stable, with the network of fine age craquelure that is characteristic of the artist’s thickly worked canvases of the 1950s; the pale ground reads through the cracks across the background and gives the surface its silvery sparkle. The canvas is sound and evenly tensioned on its stretcher with cross-bars; the reverse is clean. Unframed. A detailed condition report with ultraviolet photographs is available on request.Shipping: Aurora & Athena coordinates professional, insured shipping for every purchase through vetted logistics partners: packing, transport, insurance and the export paperwork are arranged on the buyer's behalf and charged at the provider's cost. Buyers are equally welcome to collect in Barcelona or to appoint a carrier of their own. Lots are released once the total purchase price has been received. For shipments outside the EU an export licence may be required and Spanish export duties may apply to certain higher-value works; these are the buyer's responsibility. No export tax applies within the EU. Full shipping and export information is available on request.Conditions of Sale: All lots are sold as is, in the condition described. The condition summary is given as a courtesy; a full condition report is available on request before the sale. Attributions and the five-year authenticity guarantee are governed by Section 4 (Returns and Refunds) of our Terms and Conditions. All enquiries must be made before bidding; no further information can be provided after the sale. By placing a bid you confirm that you have read and accept our Terms and Conditions in full, as set out in the terms of this sale.-- A young mother in a white áo dài holds her child, dressed in pale pink, against a ground of shimmering blue, turquoise and silver-grey. Both faces are turned a little away from us: the mother’s long, almond-eyed, with the rounded brow and small red mouth that Vu Cao Dam gave his women from the 1930s onwards; the child’s round and alert, looking out over her shoulder. In the upper left, small and far away, a horseman in red rides a dark horse across the haze, the cavalier who crosses so many of the artist’s canvases of these years like a memory of the Vietnamese legends he grew up with. Painted in 1957, the picture belongs to the decade in which Vu Cao Dam, settled in the south of France since 1949 and from 1952 in Vence, near Chagall, gave up silk for oil. The surface shows what that change made possible: the paint is laid on thickly and worked in every direction, scratched and dragged so that the ground glitters through it, and the figures emerge from the atmosphere rather than standing in front of it. The palette of cool blues warmed by touches of ochre and rose is the one that made his work of the 1950s immediately recognisable at Galerie Romanet in Paris and, from 1963, at Wally Findlay Galleries in New York and Chicago. The mother and child is the theme to which the artist returned most often, in bronze and in paint, and the version offered here brings together its two essential moods: the tenderness of the embrace and the quiet distance of the two figures, who look past each other into the blue. At 60 by 80 centimetres it is a substantial canvas for the period, and it comes to auction from a private collection in Paris, where the present owner acquired it in 2020.

Estimación:€15,000

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