Oil on canvas

55 × 42 cm. 21 5/8 × 16 1/2 in.

Signed in English on bottom left

LITERATURE
1994, The Art Works of Sanyu and Yun Gee, Lin & Keng Gallery, Inc., Taipei, p.50
1995, Yun Gee, Lin & Keng Gallery, Inc., Taipei, p.77
EXHIBITED
4 – 23 Oct 1943, Paintings by Yun Gee, Milch Galleries, New York
1 – 30 Nov 1993, The Art Works of Sanyu and Yun Gee, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei
19 Aug – 5 Sep 1995, Yun Gee Solo Exhibition, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei

PROVENANCE
Milch Galleries, New York, 1943
Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

Tribute to the Motherland, Time of the Memory
Yun Gee's Rare Still Life Work Flowers and Fruits

With an active life experience from San Francisco, Paris, to New York, Yun Gee at the age of early 1920s was able to widely absorb the ideas of Western art schools and simultaneously shape his iconic creative style. In 1924, he entered the California Academy of Fine Arts and studied painting after Otis Oldfield, gradually establishing his own personal and modern expression of color, shape, and light. In 1926, he founded the Modern Gallery and held an solo exhibition. Prince Murat and his wife highly appreciated his works and sponsored him to go to Paris for artistic development. In 1937, he proposed the avant-garde Diamondism, a monument to his personal aesthetics achievement. By that year, he was invited to participate in no less than 14 group exhibitions and exhibited his works with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and many other famous art masters, receiving high recognition from the Western painting circles. Since then, on the journey of art, he creates a shining and elegant path.

Representative of the Quintessential Still Life Painting: The Most Sentimental Writing of Life

Yun Gee returned to New York from Paris in 1940 and successively held solo exhibitions at Tempo Gallery, Montross Gallery, and Milch Galleries, ushering in another peak of his artistic career. In January 1942, he also married Helen Wimmer, a lover he had been with for 7 years. The happiness of life and the development of his artistic career became the key to this stage of his life, which allows his inner abundance of emotions to surge out through still life creation. Flowers and Fruits presented this time is completed between 1941 and 1942. Among his rare 10 still life oil paintings, six of them have floral elements, while his work highlights both Western-style full configuration and oriental vivid charm, which is crowned among them, brimming with the brilliance of mature and confident painting language, second to none.

The completed work was firstly shown in Yun Gee's Solo Exhibition held at Milch Galleries in New York in 1943. After that, it appeared in the important joint exhibition The Art Works of Sanyu and Yun Gee held by Lin & Keng Gallery in 1993, and Yun Gee Solo Exhibition in 1995. The detailed exhibition records highly prove its value and representativeness as well. It is the first time that this painting is presented in the auction market and thus stands for a rare opportunity for collection!

Emotion in the Paints: Freehand Recreation of Western Colors and Forms

Different from the prosperous and full posture of ordinary western-style vase flower still life, Flowers and Fruits focuses on six slender and stretched plants, including dianthus and periwinkle flowers, which incorporates the graceful oriental aesthetics. In terms of brushwork, the artist uses smooth and rhythmic curves to apply what he learned from calligraphy practice. The ink trace reminds us of the swaying ink Morning Glory of Yun's Cantonese instructor Gao Jianfu. Through the richness of oil paints, Yun turns his path from realism to freehand brushwork, presenting a delicate and timeless sentiment with a structure full of freedom, realizing a high degree of integration of Eastern and Western forms.

In terms of color, he is also not confined to Cézanne's pursuit of stable forms of light and color. Based on the superposition theory of cold and warm color blocks of co-colorism, he breaks through the realistic form with rich tonal changes, so as to convey his tangible feelings through the symbolized objects. Among them, the rose-red and blue-purple contrasts of the petals create a warm-cold color correlation. In the high-low composition of the flowers and the color resonance he created, flowers show an elegant vitality, indicating the warmth of a corner of the home, and recording the lovely time of the artist and his wife. At the same time, he applied bright red, lemon yellow, grass green, orange yellow to form a free color relationship all on the surface of the apple that also reflected the environmental color of the copper bottle black and tablecloth white to form a visual linkage point. The correlation makes the objects in the painting all glowing with endless vitality in the dynamic colors.

The Flower and the Painter: The Beautiful from Oriental

At the end of the 1930s, Yun regarded “the Fundamentals of Life's Matter and Spirit” as the core of his creation, exercising three major elements proposed by his Diamondism, the “Physical”, “Psychological”, and “Brainful” elements. Starting from the physical characteristics of the depicted object, the longing and expectation derived from personal life and the lingering feelings derived from Eastern identity are injected, presenting an aesthetic view of objective objects with subjective spiritual expression.

Compared with Flower and Still Life with Pheasant created in the 1920s,the auctioned work Flowers and Fruits remarks Yun's breakthrough in the practice of the “life and death” theme of traditional Dutch still life painting, embodying emotions in a more elegant style. The flowers depicted in the painting are like the dianthus and periwinkle that grow in southern China, symbolizing “love” and “pleasant memories” respectively. Periwinkle flowers change day by day, portraying the beautiful life, while the two blue-purple dianthus flowers indicate the feeling of homesickness. The flowers hang down above the fruits, implying that life blossoms and bears fruit. Even though Yun has been away from home for twenty years, he has never forgotten his identity as a Chinese. Looking back at his life, he traveled in France and the United States for art, dedicated to modernist art, and even incorporated Eastern aesthetics into Western style. Just like the flowers in his painting, he blooms on the foreign land, praising the beauty of life with enthusiasm and paintbrushes.

Price estimate:
HKD: 900,000 - 1,500,000
USD: 115,600 - 192,700

Auction Result:
HKD: 1,080,000