Friday, January 24, 2014

Yun Gee 1931


New York Sun
May 2, 1931
Yun Gee is a young Chinaman from Canton now showing his paintings in the gallery on Ninth street known as “In Tempo.” Mr. Gee studied in San Francisco, and has already exhibited in Paris. The paintings shown in Paris were the result of an academic outlook upon life which Mr. Gee has since dropped, apparently, as his new pictures are quite in the modern manner. This new language has not yet been assimilated by the young artist, and the heavy dependence it makes upon pure color is evidently a tax upon his strength. He has ability and confidence, however, and doubtless will make a name for himself.

The New York Times
May 3, 1931
Yun Gee, a Chinese artist, has been exhibiting at the gallery of In Tempo. The exhibition closed yesterday, but it is announced that some of his paintings will be shown at another gallery in a few weeks. Mr. Gee was born in Canton, China. When he came to America, at the age of 15, he established a modern art gallery in San Francisco. His work was shown not long ago at the Bernheim Jeune Galleries in Paris.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
June 22, 1931
Distinctive Coloring, Modern Treatment Feature Art Exhibit
Distinctive coloring and ultra-modern treatment are stressed in the group exhibition of paintings, sketches and sculpture by native and foreign artists at the Brooklyn Museum.

The display, opened to the public this month, closes in October.

Yesterday the museum was visited by Kay Shau Fung, Chinese Consul in New York City.

Among the studies are those by Yun Gee, young Chinese artist, whose wife is Princess Paule De Reuss, French poet and portrait painter.

Several volumes of her verse were sponsored by the Comtess de Noailles, prominent in Parisian literary circles. The Princess was married to Mr. Yun 18 months ago in Paris.

One of Yun’s outstanding works is a Kekemonos—oil painting—visualizing the Resurrection of the Messiah. Princess De Reuss’ oil portrait of her husband and his study of her are also exhibited.

Yun Gee was born in China and studied native art, later taking a course in a California art school.

The New York Times
September 24, 1931
Aids Flood Sufferers in China
Yun Gee, a Chinese artist living in New York, has been enthusiastically engaged in the task of helping spur on the Chinese flood relief campaign in behalf of his distressed countrymen. Mr. Gee has painted a mural seventeen feet long, which depicts the stricken area in China. It is on exhibition in this city at the Chinese public school, 16 Mott Street, and is to be sold in the interest of flood relief work.

New York Evening Post
September 24, 1931
Mural to Aid Chinese
Native Artist’s Painting to Be Sold for Flood Sufferers
Yun  Gee, a Chinese artist living in New York, has painted a mural seventeen feet long which depicts the flood-stricken area in China. It is on exhibition at the Chinese public school, 18 Mott Street, and is to be sold in the interest of flood relief work.

Yun Gee held his first New York one-man show last  season. Fifteen of his paintings were included in the summer show at the Brooklyn Museum, and he is to be represented in the self-portrait, exhibition held by the College Art Association in its headquarters in West Fifty-eighth Street, opening next Monday.

The New York Times
September 29, 1931
...The self-portrait exhibition is built on a theme bound to interest pretty nearly everybody. The roster is of international scope, embracing artists of many lands. Its contrasts are, naturally, both many and (sometimes) quite violent. We find Anne Goldwaithe, for example, gently unconcerned in the presence of Yun Gee; Eugene Zak perfectly serene and cool before Max Beckman's startling fireworks.…

The New York Times
October 4, 1931
Self-portrait show at the College Art Association headquarters...Look at Max Beckman, look at Raoul Dufy (as a delightful youth) and A. Feder with his flair for the architectural arrangement and Kars with his red pumpkin-like face and Charles Kvapil and George Luks and William Nicholson and Henri de Waroquier and Yun Gee and Eugene Zac. But, for that matter, look at them all. “My face is my fortune, sir, she said.” It may also be an incorrigible index.

Standard Union
(Brooklyn, New York)
November 4, 1931
We happened to be looking over “Who’s Who in China” and read the sketch of Yun Gee, a youthful Chinese artist who confesses that at the age of fourteen “he had accumulated 200 canvasses, but to his awakened spirit they seemed to be the work of a man who had long been lost in blindness and symbols of his one-time slavery to the academic and he destroyed them in a bonfire with a prayer, pledging to forget.”

It’s just youth; nothing more. It’s a great spirit and if tamed and curbed it meant much. But unleavened with brains it is plain imbecility.

The spirit that impels youth to revolt against rules and conventions is wholesome, for it compels them to think things out. But many of them mistake form for substance, not realizing that there is more dynamite against existing ideas in the clean, well-written, completely understandable prose of a Mencken, for example, than in two hogsheads of Joyce and Gertrude Stein. They tend to believe that imbecility, whether in music, art or letters, if it is only different, is the substance of revolt—and therein they are as wrong as human beings can ever be.

When we hear callow unhatched youths just out of college sneering at those who discipline their minds we think of Gertrude and James and Yun Lee [sic], and are comforted. Those who are not crazy will grow up and all will be well.

The New York Times
November 22, 1931
Chinese Artists Hold Exhibition
...Paintings by Yun Gee and other Chinese artists are on view today at International House, 500 Riverside Drive, for the benefit of the Chinese Student Emergency Relief Fund.


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