Precious moment: Vu Cao Dam and art dealer-collector Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, at the artist's home in southern France in 1999. — File Photo

HCM CITY — Fifteen lithographs of Vu Cao Dam's paintings from an overseas Vietnamese's collection will be exhibited for the first time in Asia.

The art works with the signature of the 20th-century master painter will be displayed in the lobby of Metropolitan Building 235 Dong Khoi Street in District 1 in HCM City from June 16 to 23, and then sold to raise funds for the Education Development Fund.

The owner of the works, Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, said she began collecting paintings in 1991, and particularly liked the works of Vu Cao Dam.

"At that time, I knew that no gallery in Viet Nam had his paintings. Fortunately, while attending a painting auction event in Singapore in 1997, I was really happy to see foreign collectors choose works of Viet Nam's first generation of painters."

Huong said the paintings were full of the Vietnamese soul, spirit and philosophy, even though they used foreign techniques.

Vu Cao Dam graduated from the Indochina Fine Arts College in Ha Noi. He and three other graduates, painters Le Pho, Mai Trung Thu and Le Thi Luu, moved to Paris to study.

After graduation in 1931, Dam received a scholarship that enabled him to travel to France to continue his studies, and he departed Viet Nam in November of that year.

After settling in Paris, he enrolled in the Far East section of the Ecole du Louvre, the fine arts school of the museum, and within the confines of the great Louvre and other museums and galleries in Paris, he was able to view and to study, firsthand, the great European masterpieces of centuries past.

Dam was born on January 8, 1908 in Ha Noi and died in France in 2000. — VNS