Author Description

War has never looked quite so lovely. Armed with sketchbooks, small pieces of paper, pencil, Biro, magic markers, pastels, brushes, Chinese ink, and watercolors, Vietcong artists captured the beautiful images of war reproduced here. With roots in 19th-century French neoclassicism, Vietcong art offers a vision so at odds with familiar images of the Vietnam War that it astonishes. According to Alan Riding from The New York Times, "Propaganda Art was only the most visible face of Vietnamese art of this period; artists were also painting lyrically... With a poetic realism introduced by their French colonial teachers." These artists played on the contradiction between unchanging, beautiful natural surroundings and the reality of suffering and bloodshed, in order to provide a lyrical artistic statement of what was a gruesome reality. Moving with fighters and living in tunnels, caves, and holes, they produced documentary and didactic watercolors in vivid hues, and black and white. With a disinclination toward depicting the macabre--due to a mix of censorship and sensitivity to their fellow soldiers--the Vietcong artists instead painted portraits that express the camaraderie the soldiers shared. Shown here are intimate scenes of men in uniform reading, playing cards, and listening to music that, were it not for the AK-47 lying nearby, could have well been executed in times of peace. During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong employed 100 official war artists, of which 20 are included here. Born in the 1920s and 30s, the Vietcong artists were graduates of the Hanoi Institute of Fine Art, and the works here were created between 1964 and 1975 in the south of Vietnam. Watercolors, drawings, and sketches by these artists are in the collections of the Ho Chi Min City Museum and the British Museum in London. Edited by Toan Thi Nguyen and Sherry Buchanan. Foreword by Neil Jamieson. Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in./200 pgs / 200 color.