Interstitial
The Question of Blue: Shame and Obsession in K. P. Ly’s Landscapes
Paul Quan
On the anniversary of the Surrealist Vietnamese French painter K. P. Ly’s disappearance, we return to the troubled nexus of his work, which has been described by the legendary critic Guy Robart
Ly: “I weary of his paintings even before my eyes meet the canvas.” André Breton did not name Ly among his cadre.
Never popular or profitable in his time, the hermetic Ly worked on the fringes of the bohemian art movement in Paris. He seldom showed his work. He did not, like so many of his peers,
find solace in community. Toward the end of his career, Ly was often compared unfavorably to Lê Ph? and Mai Trung Th?, Vietnamese contemporaries whose nostalgic oil paintings spoke in elegant contrast to Ly’s horror-filled references to colonial Indochina.
Ly did not attend openings or deign to publicly speak about his paintings, preferring to let his oneiric landscapes communicate
for themselves. This would be a mistake. In a time where the artistic conversation centered on individuation and the powers
of the unconscious mind, Ly’s silence became an obdurate obstacle to his material success. He was seen as a determined outsider, before it became fashionable
to exist outside of the mainstream of art.
Many even speculated that K. P. Ly was not one artist, but a studio of scheming, money-hungry charlatans. That theory was later dismissed by the majority of
Asian art scholars, but the stain of perfidy remains. When Ly vanished in 1943, during a time of great unrest, few of his peers missed or regarded him. All that remains today is an oeuvre
that tells a cryptic story.
Little is known—or will likely be known—about the artist’s history. What we can uncover comes from one source alone: the erratic
correspondence between Ly and his agent, Emil Blanc, whom Ly counted as a loyal friend. Through Blanc’s letters and interviews, we know that Ly arrived at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière sometime in the mid-1920s as a student on scholarship. His first painting
sold five years later for a pittance and even his more popular work, like Midnight Feast, commanded negligible sums. Blanc privately despaired to his sister, Justine Allard, doubting that Ly would ever make a name for himself.
In Ly’s work, scholars detect a pastiche of influence. We see the imprint of Tanguy’s biomorphic language and the intimate scale
of early Ernst. He utilized a Surrealist vocabulary and yet his subjects could only come from the imagination of a Vietnamese
immigrant. Toward the end of his career, his paintings became more manic. Many art buyers—and dealers—complained that his
work gave them migraines. No inch of the canvas provided psychic quarter. One must always be confronted with Ly’s internal dissolution.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ly began to sell more steadily, though he would never be a prolific painter. Blanc brokered a handful of middling commissions
on his behalf. Through his career, Ly’s subjects remained largely the same: fragmented landscapes of Viet Nam, often overrun by the monsters of his torrid imagination.
Elephants with great metal tusks, winged sirens roosting in palm trees, churning oceans.
And blue—always blue. His contemporary, the figurative painter August Bazin, complained that there was a national shortage due to “Ly’s damned obsession. ”
Why blue? He was not the first or last to find inspiration in the color of longing. Picasso went through his famous blue period.
Yves Klein worried over the “dimensionless shade.” Later, Rothko would paint large swathes of royal blue in his color field
paintings. Yet while these other artists reveled in the expressiveness—the transcendence—of the color, Ly seemed haunted by it.
Blanc once wrote, “Blue will be the death of him. It tortures him. It is guilt and melodrama and shame—oh what shame! Only
after his last breath will he relinquish that curse.”
Even within the artist’s convulsive relationship with the color, one senses a deep tenderness as well. Ly takes pains to delineate between azure and lapis. His suns swirl with the rare pigment of Maya blue. The faces of his monsters
glow in all the shades of ultramarine. His fidelity to blue is unimpeachable.
If the final story of K. P. Ly is obscure—some might say surreptitious—we can see how it is, in the end, a story of love and loyalty.
Only twelve Ly paintings are known to exist today. Some were destroyed in the Second World War; others simply and tragically lost to time.
His sole work of portraiture, Blue Mirror, remains in a private collection in Chicago. Its predominant palette is blue.