Vu Cao Dam is one of the four overseas masters of Vietnamese modern art, alongside Le Pho, Mai Trung Thu, and Le Thi Luu. He attended the second class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine. Majoring in sculpture, during his five years at the school, Vu Cao Dam mostly made sculptures, which won him a series of awards and received recognition at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. When he moved to Paris in 1932, after enrolling in the Ecole du Louvre, he switched to painting. Le Pho was once asked “who is the greatest Vietnamese painter of the twentieth century, and he answered without hesitation, “Vu Cao Dam.”

Coming from a scholarly family, Vu Cao Dam often makes paintings referencing Vietnamese literature, such as the Tale of Kieu, the poetic saga by Nguyen Du in the early nineteenth century. His work encompasses a variety of subjects that reflect the culture of Vietnam. His paintings from the 1930s to the 1940s are mostly watercolor, ink, and gouache on silk. Before applying pigments, he would dampen the silk to create a lucid translucency or soak it in water mixed with a little black ink to add depth to the background. In a way, the artist developed his painting style by combining the Western compositional approaches, Chinese ancient ink painting, and the Vietnamese tradition of silk painting.

After he moved from Paris to southern France in 1949, Vu Cao Dam experimented with various mediums and focused more on oil painting, sometimes adding eggs to the paint. Compared to his earlier period, where he admired pre-Renaissance paintings, his oil paintings from later times portray figures showing influences alternating between Italian Renaissance and Post-Impressionism. At the time, he lived near Matisse’s Chapel and became friends with Marc Chagall and Jean Dubuffet. Starting in 1963, he primarily produced oil on canvas and concentrated on figurative paintings.