For forty years, Nguyen Tu Nghiem has drawn upon the arts of the village to shape a distinctive modern Vietnamese art. He sought inspiration in the country's traditional culture rather than in the art of the west. A trailblazer and model for many Northern artists, young and old, Nghiem's work vividly demonstrates the kinship between traditional Vietnamese culture and the spirit of western modernism. "After I learned about traditional culture, I found it easy to understand Picasso." A student of the first class of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine he joined the Resistance forces in 1945 and taught in the Viet Bac Fine Arts College. Though he had learned western techniques at the Ecole, after 1954 Nghiem "searched for my own way" through the study of Vietnamese culture-temple, pagoda, dinh, and funery sculpture, woodblock prints, the architecture, dance and music of the village. His paintings of village dancers and festivals, national myths and literature, and zodiac figures have captured the immediacy, energy, and innocent exuberance of these village arts.
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Rooster and Hen, 1977, gouache on paper, 9 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches; Courtesy of Helen Moed Pomeroy

The twelve animals of the lunar zodiac have been a constant theme in Nghiem's art. Like the woodblock prints made in the village of Dong Ho for Tet(Lunar New Year), Nghiem's aminals are blocks of color outlined with thick black lines. His zodiac animals, including this rooster, possess a childlike simplicity and directness, Unrestricted in details, Nghiem beilievs that art should "describe the whole," the feel and emotion of objects and events. Publication in 1975 of a popular book on Vietnamese communal house sculpyure triggered a creative period in the mid-1970s, resulting in works such as this of which the artist has said, "The animals I did from life and from sculpture."

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