He was best known for his sardonic, unflinching, politically provocative drawings of daily life in pre-World War II Paris and in French Indochina, where his mother was born and where he traveled as a young man.

He was the first-born son of French sculptor Pierre Vigoureux [fr] and the older brother of celebrated photographer Fernand Fonssagrives.

[1] Pierre served in the French Army in World War I from 1914 to 1918 and received the Croix de Guerre, with Honorable Mention.

This decision was later described in a review for a show held at the United American Artists Gallery in San Francisco from May 4–21, 1941; “This conviction and uncompromising courage has come to the 33-year old artist through personal experiences which include a first-hand knowledge of the workings of French (and English) imperialism when he voluntarily extended his period of compulsory military training in the French Army by another year in order to be able to visit French Indo-China.”[4] Jean and his father both exhibited works at the Salon de l'Essor in Dijon in 1933,[1] where Jean's works included his painting La Boulangerie.

[5] The Parisian journal Comoedia called it a promising debut for a young painter of "frank and personal talent.

[7] Jean may have met his future wife Fanny G. Varnum in France, where she researched the life of François Jean de Chastellux [fr] and wrote a doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Letters, University of Paris, published in 1936 as Un philosophe cosmopolite du XVIIle slecle, le chevalier de Chastellux (Paris: Librarie Rodstein).

The Los Angeles Times wrote: "The paintings, which strongly assert the third dimension, are of the deliberately 'proletarian' sort, the figures of workmen and their families clumsily drawn in gloomy colors to convey the idea of their thwarted lives.

The drawings, which show an anti-imperialist slant on French officialdom in Indo-China, prove that Vigoureux is an able draughtsman and a remarkable and painstaking designer.

His most remarkable works are, in our opinion, the four paintings on Indo-China:The Arroyo; The Annamite Farm; Annamese Workers; Ruins of Angkor .

"[12] Loading Precious Wood depicts laborers foisting a massive piece of timber onto an open rail car, which would ride on railroad tracks resting on the railroad ties also harvested from these forests, as described by Pamela D. McElwee in Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam.

"Yet this 'Precious Wood' was not to be used by local people, as the best and most valuable wood was found in 'Reserved Forests'...and rights to timber sold for public auction by private contractors...with tax revenues going to colonial authorities......these reserves were inaugurated mostly near major communication routes (rivers, seashores, roads, canals, railroads) as close as possible to a place of labor.

"Other products were grown on vast plantations, making huge profits for owners, including tobacco, coffee, rubber, etc.

A young boy runs in the street, carrying the bourgeois newspaper Le Bourremou, whose subtitle is Organ of the Plutocracy.

Asia magazine published four of Vigoureux's pen-and-ink drawings (described as "watercolors") in their December 1940 issue: Marketplace (Saigon), Loading Precious Wood, Southern Indochina: Rice Fields, and Soup Vendor.

[29]Paul ends on a more hopeful note, saying the drawings "carry an assurance that in spite of enemy-controlled propaganda, the French have not lost their integrity but only the chance to be known and heard.

His technique is derived from the sound training his father, the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Dijon, imparted to him and a wistful zest for life.”[30] As in his drawings of French Indochina, words appear in the images, driving home their satirical and political intent.

The novel La Condition Humaine (English title: Man's Fate) by Andre Malraux sits on the table.

6, Opposition, a young woman clutches a newspaper called Human Progress with the headline, "Let Us Overthrow the Oldsters With Their Odious and Outmoded Experiences!"

Another man is reading a newspaper in English, with the headline, "The Cezanne Exhibition in New York Met A Great Success."

La Condition Humaine (English title: Man's Fate) by Andre Malraux sits prominently on the table.

Malraux was a target of the Otto Abetz blacklisting of authors forbidden to be read, circulated, or sold in Nazi-occupied France.

Two of Vigoureux's drawings from the book were published in The Clipper magazine, January, 1941, with text explaining they were "part of a series on Paris, before its downfall…done with the intention of portraying the wretched state of the French working class, even before the Nazi oppression.

The Los Angeles Times wrote: “Ordinary persons shown as they go through the drab routines of daily existence are the subject matter of Jean Vigoureux…He finds individuals humorous in a way that often impels him to hint at caricature as he draws them.

From the gallery's pamphlet: "Like his compatriot, the great novelist Andre Malraux, Jean Vigoureux combines with his artistic talent that profound political understanding and that genuinely progressive outlook which have achieved a perfect unity of artistic form with a political content which is not only satirical as in most of the drawings, but often, especially in the paintings, full of that dramatic and emotional quality which is indeed one of the truest aspects of the struggle of modern society."

The Los Angeles Times gave a more bleak assessment: "Jean Vigoureux, a young French painter now in Hollywood, sees a world steeped in gloom.

"[33] The works in Twenty-Eight Drawings of Paris include: On September 21, 1942, in Los Angeles, Jean Vigoureux enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

His Indochina landscape painted on wood in 1958, Jungle River, was based on L’Arroyo, an oil on canvas exhibited twenty years earlier in his first U.S. gallery show.

An epiphyte, likely a bromeliad, grows on a fallen tree branch, with a pink flower at its center and spiky green leaves.

An untitled painting of uncertain date shows a very different side of Vigoureux the political provocateur steeped in gloom.

The Buddha in the drawing is gigantic, the mute witness of an unpleasant scene of raucous soldiers playing tourist and cajoling a hapless woman.