Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 24" x 28"
Frame Size: 29" x 23"
Condition: Great, No Blemishes
Style: Impressionist/Post Impressionist
Provenance: Private collection of New York.

Artist: Gee Yun (1906 - 1963)

Gee Yun was active/lived in New York, California / China, France. Gee Yun is known for modernist landscape, figure-genre painting, mural.

Reflecting the early, uprooted period in his life is an oil painting, Where Is My Mother, dated 1927. It is "a portrait of himself weeping, next to two other people, one of whom is also crying." (Goodman, 194) Above them is an abstract landscape with a female figure and a ship in the distance.

Under the patronage of Prince and Princess Achille Murat, Yun Gee went to Paris in 1927 to pursue further study. Again he associated with prominent avant-garde persons and exhibited his painting at the Salon des Indépendants. He also had a solo exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1929. Influenced by a combination that included Taoist philosophy, Chinese love of word play, and fragmented references of Gertrude Stein, he frequently attached his own poetry to his paintings. There he married Princess Paule de Reuss, a poetess, and because of the marriage, her family disowned her.

For financial reasons, Gee was forced to return to New York during the Depression of the 1930's without his wife, and they divorced in 1932, which sent Gee into a deep depression and into the alcoholism he battled the remainder of his life. Although he exhibited in major galleries in New York City area, including the Brooklyn Museum, he stopped painting during this dark period in his life.

Living in New York from 1930 to 1936, he painted and wrote poetry, which met with indifference. Of this period it was written: "Despite his inclusion in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in 1931, and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, Gee struggled greatly throughout the Depression. Remaining closely involved with the Chinese community, Gee was an active fundraiser for causes in China. He completed a large mural on K Street as a contribution to the Chinese Flood Relief Campaign. He participated in art programs sponsored by the WPA, such as the Easel Painter's Project. From this period onward, Gee would sporadically produce paintings and drawings with overtly political subject matter. One of his paintings included in MoMA's Murals by American Painters and Photographers is considered to be his masterwork. Wheels: Industrial New York did not fit neatly into the late Futurist or the Social Realist camp, but rather created a dynamic synthesis of cubist influences and an ironic sense of realism."

He returned to Paris in 1936, and felt more accepted and received positive responses to his work, which was exhibited widely. But three years later, chased from Europe by the war, he settled in New York City, where he lived until his death in 1963. In 1942, he married Helen Wimmer, and they had a daughter, Li-lan, who became an artist. Wimmer and Gee were divorced in 1947, and several years Velma Aydelott became his companion for the remainder of his life. In the 1940's amidst much personal turmoil, Gee's painting career ended; he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

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