Pop Art Portrait With a Bold Red Conical Hat — Print & Oil Painting

The picture runs on three colours and refuses a fourth. A red hat, black hair, a blue tunic, set on a pale grey ground with the face kept near white. There is no green, no brown, no shadow colour and no incidental note anywhere on the canvas.

The hat is handled as geometry rather than as an object. It is a smooth red cone with a broad curved brim, seen slightly from below, so the underside opens on both sides into a darker crimson pocket closed by one fine black line. No straw, no weave, no stitching. The shape alone is asked to carry it.

The hair is a hard edged black rectangle running from the crown to the collarbone and squared off flat at the bottom, without a strand or a parting anywhere in it. It works as a frame: a pale face inside a black box inside a red arc, three shapes nested one within the next.

Inside that frame the face is flat and even, with a faint grey shading at the nose and under the lower lip and nothing else. Thin dark brows, almond eyes with round black irises, a small nose, and one loud red mouth. The mouth is the only place in the picture where the volume rises.

Her ao dai is cornflower blue with a high mandarin collar, and the diagonal front opening has been reduced to a single fine dark line running from the throat out to the shoulder with three small red fasteners spaced along it. That row of three is the entire detail of the garment. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside the same treatment cropped closer, in a red hat and a deep blue collar and a seated portrait after Mai Trung Thu, a young woman in green on a plain stool.