The Frontline Collection is a privately held collection of over a 1,000 paintings and drawings by around seventy Vietnamese artists who risked their lives to produce their art on or near the frontlines in Vietnam’s long struggle for independence from the 1950s until the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Most of these artists were embedded with the Viet Minh, the National Liberation Front, or the North Vietnamese Army. Some were commissioned artists, there to record heroic deeds and victories, inspire and produce propaganda to support the resistance efforts and to help maintain morale. Others were amateur artist-soldiers who documented their personal war time experiences and friendships and found solace through art when free from action. They all carried their art materials on their backs and many made the long, arduous and dangerous trek down the Truong Son, or Ho Chi Minh Trail, to the South.
The Frontline Collection comprises over a thousand works, mostly combat art, as well as a number of studio watercolours, lithographs, woodblock prints and oils making it one of the most significant collections of war art known to exist outside Vietnam.