Painting by Vietnamese artist auctioned for over 2 million USD

The program "In Search of Eternity: The Philippe Damas Collection" organized by Christie's on the evening of March 29 featured about 50 paintings with Asian themes, especially Southeast Asia. "Le Trois Femmes" (Three Women) reached the highest price at the event - equivalent to 53 billion VND. The selling price was 4 times higher than the initial estimate of about 4 million HKD (13.1 billion VND). The artist painted the work in 1934, measuring 116.5 x 89.5 cm.

At the event, another painting by Nguyen Gia Tri, "Boat in Ha Long Bay" reached 504,000 HKD (1.65 billion VND).

All the paintings in the auction come from the collection of Philippe Damas, a Frenchman who lived in Asia for many years and is passionate about Southeast Asian culture. According to the auction house, the work was kept by artist Le Pho and exhibited at a museum in Belgium in 2002.

At the same auction, a series of works by famous painters Mai Trung Thu, Vu Cao Dam, Le Pho, Nguyen Phan Chanh, Nguyen Sang, To Ngoc Van, Bui Xuan Phai, and Nguyen Tien Chung were hammered from tens of thousands to about 4 million HKD (13 billion VND).

Nguyen Gia Tri was born in 1908 in Chuong My, Hanoi, graduated from the Indochina College of Fine Arts in 1936. He is one of the Four Great Masters of Vietnamese Painting: "First Tri, second Van, third Lan, fourth Can". He organized his first exhibitions in 1939 - 1940.

He is considered one of the leading painters in creating a new trend in lacquer art. He contributed to bringing Vietnamese lacquer to its peak with the combination of traditional Asian cultural elements of the Vietnamese people on lacquer material and Western academic painting methods.

In 1989, Nguyen Gia Tri was recognized by the Ministry of Culture as one of the contemporary artists who contributed to the development of modern Vietnamese visual arts. He died in Ho Chi Minh City in 1993.

He was posthumously awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize for Literature and Arts in 2012. The artist has two works recognized as national treasures, including "Spring Garden of Central, South and North". at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts and "Screen" at the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts.