Softcover, 34 pages, bw and color illustrations, Washington May 1949, very good
An early publication about a artist who choose to document Tibet with painting.
Léa Lafugie (11 Feb 1890, Paris 7 — 18 June 1972, Paris 16) was a French explorer, artist and writer, one of the first solo traveler women to sojourn in Tibet, and whose body of work reflects her lasting interest in China and Southeast Asia.
After studying at Paris Ecole des Arts decoratifs (School of Decorative Arts), at Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) and Academie Jullian, she started working in fashion illustration, with nude paintings, engravings of hairstyles and portraits of young women displaying the new feminism of the “Roaring Twenties”.
As soon as 1924, Léa Lafugie embraced the vocation of “painter-traveler”, wandering through North Africa and holding her first exhibition in Tunis. Inspired by travel writer Alexandra David-Néel (who was to be nicknamed “the Parisian Lady in Lhasa”), she headed to India and Tibet, where she stayed in three occasions: 1926 (Kashmir and Ladakh), 1927 (Darjeeling, Sikkim and Tibet up to Gyantse), and 1931 (Shimla, Spiti Valley, Ladakh, Srinagar). While drawing and painting without a pause, she published her travel notes in renowned outlets, from L’Illustration to Extreme-Asie to the National Geographic, and wrote two books, displaying a noted talent for ethnographical observations in addition to her art.
In 1928 – 1929, she explored successively Shanghai, Burma (now Myanmar), Siam (Thailand), Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. In 1932, back from France for her largest solo exhibition (‘Five Years of Expeditions in Asia’, Galerie Pleyel, 1930), she married in Paris Claude-Prosper-André Decamps, a forestry expert she had met in French Indochina. All the way, she “managed to alternate long periods of solitary exploration in territories where no European had penetrated and luxurious stays in local aristocratic families or Western diplomatic circles, with the “policy” of being accepted everywhere by offering their portrait to her hosts, seized with curiosity and enchanted by her artistic talent as well as by her open-mindedness and her understanding of situations.”