Le Pho, 1907–2001

1907–1925A mandarin's son

Lê Phổ was born on August 2, 1907, at Hà Đông, near Hanoi.¹ He came from one of the great mandarin families of Tonkin.² His father, Lê Hoan, was the governor of Hải Dương province and an imperial official allied with the French, and he took part in the hunt for the anti-colonial leader Hoàng Hoa Thám.³

The boy hardly knew him. His wife said later that he remembered nothing of his father except that he smoked opium.⁴ He lost his mother very young as well, and he grew up with an older brother and sister-in-law, where he was blamed for whatever trouble the nephews and nieces caused.⁴ He said little to his own children about those years. His son Alain thought the mothers and family scenes in the paintings might come from having never known his mother.⁵

He had a classical schooling, including Chinese characters, and at the Lycée du Protectorat in Hanoi he perfected his French and met Mai Trung Thứ, who would be his friend for life.² By 1924 he was painting oil portraits of his father, his sister and his brother-in-law.⁶

1925–1931The first class

In 1925 he sat the first entrance examination of the new École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi and was admitted to its first class.⁶ The school had been founded by the French painter Victor Tardieu with the Vietnamese painter Nam Sơn. In the mornings Joseph Inguimberty taught drawing, painting and life modelling. In the afternoons Nam Sơn taught East Asian decorative arts.⁶

Le Pho went from class to the library, where he read on Tang and Han sculpture and on Song and Ming painting.⁶ He became Tardieu’s favorite pupil.⁷ His wife called Tardieu a spiritual father to him.⁴ What he remembered of the teaching was a warning against copying.

“When he taught us, Mr. Tardieu did not want us to imitate Western painting, but to hold firmly to our own tradition.”⁷

While still a student he received his first commission, a large oil on canvas for the Maison de l’Indochine at the Cité universitaire in Paris, dated 1929.² It is still in the building, now the Maison des étudiants de l’Asie du Sud-Est.⁸ He graduated with the first class in 1930.⁶

1931–1932Paris and Europe

In the spring of 1931 Tardieu sent him to Paris to work under Pierre Guesde, chief commissioner of the Indochinese pavilions at the Exposition coloniale. He oversaw the school’s display inside the replica of Angkor Wat, and for weeks he hardly left the site, deciding where each painting should hang.⁶ That year he also showed three paintings at a colonial art exhibition in Rome.⁶

He then toured Western Europe with Tardieu, through France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.⁶ Vũ Cao Đàm joined him in Paris in December 1931.² The Renaissance court portraits he saw in Florence stayed with him, as his next venture would show.

1932–1937Hanoi

Back in Hanoi by 1933, he taught drawing and lived among the city’s intelligentsia in a lakeside villa.⁹ He designed clothes as well as paintings. In the mid-1930s he ran a fashion house, making áo dài with white frilled cuffs that came from those Florentine portraits, and he designed niello jewelry.⁶

His portraits reached the court. Emperor Bảo Đại admired them on a visit to the school in 1933, and in 1935 he was invited to Huế to paint the Emperor and Empress Nam Phương and to decorate the inner palace.⁷ He traveled to Beijing, where he visited the Palace Museum, and to Cambodia in 1936.⁶ He gave up lacquer because he was allergic to it, which is why his lacquers are few and early.¹

1937–1945France for good

In 1937 he returned to Paris to set up the Indochina section of the Exposition internationale, and this time he stayed.² Tardieu died in Hanoi that June, a few weeks after he arrived.⁷ Mai Trung Thứ reached Paris in the summer.²

The three friends became neighbors. They helped one another through hard times and shared their dealers and clients. They no longer drew a teacher’s salary and had to live from their art, and they worked on silk in a common style.² The historian Phoebe Scott has argued that the market helped shape that style, with its idealized scenes of Vietnamese women.¹⁰

In 1939 he enlisted in the French army.² After his discharge he went to Nice and took a flat on the Promenade des Anglais.⁹ There the dealer André Romanet found his work and began to show it, in Algiers and later in Paris.¹¹ On the Riviera around 1943 he met Henri Matisse, and his palette grew lighter afterwards.¹² He returned to Paris late in 1943.²

1945–1963Rue de Vaugirard

He met Paulette Vaux in 1945, a journalist for Time and Life in France.¹² They married in June 1947 and moved to 235 bis rue de Vaugirard, which was his home for the rest of his life.⁷ Their sons were born in 1947 and 1950. Alain Le Kim became a photographer, and Pierre Le-Tan became an illustrator known for his New Yorker covers.¹³ He was, Alain remembered, an inveterate art hunter who took his boys to the flea market at Saint-Ouen.⁹

In 1946 he met Ho Chi Minh, who was in France for the Fontainebleau talks.² His family kept a photograph inscribed to him by the Vietnamese leader.¹⁴ For a few years from 1950 he advised the Vietnamese embassy in Paris.¹⁵

His silks of these years, shown at the Galerie Romanet in Paris, have stronger color than the earlier ones. From about 1955 he began to add oil to the gouache and ink, a first step toward the later work.¹² He showed alongside Foujita in Lyon, Avignon, Nice and Bordeaux in 1957 and 1958.⁷

1963–c. 1990The Findlay years

In 1963 or 1964 he signed with Wally Findlay Galleries through its Paris branch on avenue Matignon, and his son dates the rise of his career to that contract.⁵ Vu Cao Dam worked with the same dealer. Findlay’s advice was simple: keep the motifs, but use larger canvases and brighter colors.¹⁶ From then on Le Pho traveled to the United States each year, showing in New York, Palm Beach and Chicago.⁷

He worked almost entirely in oil on canvas now, painting women in gardens and bouquets that he told an expert were always done from “just cut flowers.”¹² The critic Waldemar George published a monograph on him in 1970.¹⁷ He left many works undated and hesitated over the dates himself, even when correcting them in George’s book.¹²

The market has come to prize the early silks most. Asked in 1995 which period he liked best, he did not hesitate: “my Findlay period.”¹²

c. 1990–2001Last years

A road accident ended his painting, at the end of the 1980s or in 1990 by different accounts.¹² In old age, at the rue de Vaugirard, he would pose for admirers with brush and palette before a painting that stayed unfinished year after year.¹² His obituary tells of a trip to Lyon on which he found one of his own paintings of 1930 for sale and bought it back.¹⁴

He never returned to Vietnam.¹⁴ In 1993 he spoke about what that had cost him.

“I have been in France for sixty years, I hold French citizenship, but there has not been a moment when I have not remembered my homeland.”¹⁴

He said then that he had set aside twenty paintings for the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum.¹⁴ He died in Paris on December 12, 2001.¹⁴

Museums have since caught up with the market. National Gallery Singapore holds Harmony in Green: The Two Sisters and added his 1931 Jeune fille en blanc to its collection in 2023.¹⁸ In 2024 the Musée Cernuschi in Paris devoted a major exhibition to him, Mai Trung Thứ and Vũ Cao Đàm, and in 2025 National Gallery Singapore included him in City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s.² In Scott’s account he had the most significant impact of the four artists who went to Paris.¹⁰