Trung Thu Mai 1906/1980 Vietnam

Two prints by trung thu mai 1906/1980 artist born in Vietnam. The class total format 93 cm x 43 cm in very good condition. The prayer of the children total format 81 cm x 37 cm a small lack see photo. Mai Trung Thứ (Kiến An, November 10, 1906 - Clichy, October 10, 19801) is a French painter of Vietnamese origin2 known since the end of the fifties, thanks to his representations of children, painted in gouache on silk. These works, widely disseminated through reproductions3, have contributed to the knowledge of traditional Vietnamese life, both in times of peace and in the turmoil of the Vietnam War. Filmmaker and amateur photographer, he is also a musician who will express this passion through all the eras of his painting Mai Trung Thu, by his artist name Mai-Thu, was born on November 10, 1906 in the village of Ro- Nha, in the district of Kiến An (near Haiphong, in North Viet Nam). He is a son of a large and honorable Tonkinese family. His father Mai Trung Cat is a mandarin with important functions, high dignitary of the Court of Hue; he died in 1945. After secondary school at the French Lycée in Hanoi, Mai-Thu was part of the first promotion, from 1925 to 1930, of students at the School of Fine Arts in this city. From 1931 to 1937, he worked as a drawing teacher at the Lycée Français de Hué and perfected his playing of doc-huyen, a traditional Vietnamese monochord, in contact with the numerous musicians then in the former imperial city. Mai-Thu however decides to leave this country where, by birth and education, all doors are open to him. He cannot accept the feudalism inherited from the old Vietnamese empire (despite the promises of modernization of the young emperor Bao Dai), and also refuses the frozen society without a future that French Indochina offers to well-born young Vietnamese educated in the Western.[citation needed] He therefore asked to be sent to France on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1937. He left for Paris with two of his artist friends, the painters Le-Pho and Vu Cao dam. Mai-Thu, imbued with his aristocratic upbringing and an educated style of classicism at the School of Fine Arts in Hanoi under the leadership of Victor Tardieu, wishes to express and transmit the purity and sweetness of traditional Vietnamese forms to an audience who at that time cast an interested eye on "exotic" art. After his demobilization and a period in Mâcon, he returned to Paris, when painting in this capital was a philosophy.