Woman in White Ao Dai Holding Flowers by a Shuttered Window — Print & Oil Painting

Her hand has stopped halfway. It is raised to just below the chin with the fingers loosely folded, and it is not doing anything: not adjusting the collar, not holding the flowers, which are gathered in the other arm. The painting turns on that suspended gesture and on the small direct look that goes with it.

She stands almost square to us in a white ao dai, the high collar closed at the throat and the long panel falling straight to the bottom edge, and the cloth is painted with dry broken strokes so that the ochre of the wall keeps showing through it. Her hair is drawn back and falls behind the shoulder, with a few loose strands left across the temple.

The flowers are held low against the body in the crook of the other arm, and they are the one passage of real activity in the paint. Dozens of narrow white blooms are flicked upward in short stiff strokes, the stems and long leaves running down past the waist as green diagonals, and the white there is thicker and brighter than the white of the dress.

The wall takes everything else. It is a worn field of ochre, olive, umber and cream, scraped, dragged and dripped, with paint apparently lifting off it in patches, and it is carried right to the edges with no floor line and no horizon. Set into its upper left is a shuttered window with a blue grey frame and pale slats, and that rectangle is the only cool and only geometric thing on the canvas.

The measured saturation is moderate and the hue reads in the oranges, which the wall alone accounts for. A signature and date sit in the lower right corner. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a flower seller with marigold baskets by a yellow wall and a woman in sage ao dai seated beside a vase of white flowers.